The History of Champa By Assoc. Prof. Po Dharma The combined evidence of epigraphic records, the Chinese and Vietnamese annals, the Cham language manuscripts and the accounts of Western and Arab seafarers provides the historical information on Champa, a highly civilised kingdom which existed in the central part of present-day Vietnam from the end of the second to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries AD. It was long believed that Champa was confined to the coastal plains of the South China Sea, but it is also known that its territories also included the highland plateaux to the west of the region. Its population was composed not only of Champs living near the coastal area, but also of a wide variety of ethnic communities, including hill people speaking languages of the Austronesian group (Jörai, Cru, Edê and Raglai) as well as those who speaks the Austroasiatic tongue (Ma, Sré and Stieng). The list is not exhaustive. The Cham language itself is an Austronesian language. The history of Champa is dominated by the wars it fought against the Vietnamese kingdoms across their common border to the north. Faced with the emergence of Dai ViIet power, with its rapid population growth which by the 14th century had tilted the balance of power to its advantage, Champa was gradually obliged to retreat southwards until it finally disappeared in 1832. Its history had witnessed the development of two major civilisations. Until 1471, when its capital, Vijaya, fell under the onslaught of the Dai Viet king Le Thanh Tong, it had been a Hinduised state with a Sanskrit culture. At this crossroads in its history, Champa turned away from its Hinduist heritage and set off in a new direction, adopting the religious practices, cosmology, theory of kingship and social order preserved in native traditions which had continued to flourish in the southern principalities. From 1471 to 1832 the history of Champa was destined to be long struggle, as the Chams attempted to resist Vietnamese expansion, keep their independence and save their identity. The beginning of Champa It is known as to when Champa first appeared on the map of the Indochina peninsula. The Chinese annals of the late second century (the putative date being 192 AD) refer to natives living in the south of the Je Nan commandery, the region in which present-day Hué is situated, who revolted against the Chinese and founded a country which the text calls 'Lin Yi' and whose people spoke an Austronesian language. Lin Yi first expanded northwards as far as 'the Gate of Annam' (Hoanh Son), and then angulfed the Hinduised principalities to the south. While the emergence of Lin Yi is thus attested, and "(as Stein has conclusively demonstrated on the basis of history, linguistics and ethnograpgy) certainly became affiliated with Champa between the late second and the late sicth centuries, its is still uncertain as to when Lin Yi and Champa can reliably be considered as one and the same". The intervening four centuries are sparse in historical data, and it is not known whether the original population of Lin Yi were in fact practitioners of Hinduism, nor even the date at which any organised, Austroinesian speaking Hinduised kingdom in the territory of Champa actually began to exist.

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During the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries AD, Lin Yi made several attemps to push further to the north of the Gate of Annam, into a region peopled by the proto-Vietnamese. The latter foiled them on each occasion, and even invaded their adversaries in the mid-fifth century. Lin Yi was also sometimes inclined to halt the payment of its vassal tribute to China, which it had been making from the beginning of the third century, but these attempts were short-lived. We also know that in the fourth century the population were Chamspeaking, that they built houses of fired bricks, that their custom was to cremate the deads and that at court, at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth centuries, the dominant religion was Shivaism. From the seventh century onwards, the historical record becomes clearer with the account of the Chinese expeditionary force which invaded Champa in 605. It states that the capital was to the South of the 'Col des Nuages' (the Pass of the Clouds), on the site of the present-day village of Trà Kiêu. Trà Kiêu is near the religious site of My Son, and had been a centre for the propagation of Hinduism since the fourth century, although Cham was also present both as a spoken and written language. Two Sanskrit inscriptions, one dated 658 and discovered in central Vietnam, and the other 668 discovered in Cambodia, mention Champa for the first time. The Chinese transliteration 'Chan Ch'eng' does not appear until 877. In the middle of the seventh century, Champa had already expanded far to the south, as evidenced by a rock-cut inscription in the region of Nha Trang. Champa at its zénith For almost two hundred years from the eight century onwards, Champa achived its maximum geographical extent, from the Gate of Annam at Hoanh Son in the north, to the Donnai River basin in the south. Its five regions, which appear to have been principalities, were Indrapura, Amaravati, Vijaya, Kauthara and Panduranga. The inscriptions and texts indicate that the country was organised as a federation or confederation rather than a unitary kingdom. At the same time Champa pursued close relations with neighbouring states, especially China, to which it continued to send vassal tribute and ambassadors, while developing economic and religious links. Indeed Mahayana Buddhism reached Champa through monks who would put into port along the coast on their way from China to India. It flourished in the eight and ninth centuries when the Dông Duong monastery complex was built. There was also regular contact with Cambodia, initially warm but by the ninth century increasingly strained. By contrast, Champa's first contacts with the Malay world were warlike: the 'Javanese' plundered the south of the country twice at the end of the eight century, but relations improved from the ninth century onwards and led to an increasing flow of trade and friendly exchange. During the ninth century the kings of Champa not only contributed to the number of Buddhist foundations at Dông Duong but also to the Hindu shrines at My Son. At the beginning of the third quarter of the century they moved the capital from the south to the north of the country, and installed it on the site of Indrapura in the area now known as Quang Nam. This was the period when Cham civilisation modelled its social system, its concept of kinship and its religious practice along Hinduism lines, with a concomitant use of the Sanskrit language. The political, economic and social order - in short the very

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existence of this Hindunised kingdom - depended on the court, which was composed of an aristocratic elite imbued with Sanskrit culture. The end of the tenth century: a turning-point After an initial period of calm, Campa had to face several crises. The first was a Khmer invasion in 950 in the south, which it repelled, and then in 982 came a Vietnamese attack from the north which 'cost the life of the Cham king and resulted in the destruction of the capital'. The irruption of the Vietnamese into the east Indochina political arena was a major event in the history of the region at the end of the tenth century. They had scarcely shaken off the domination of the Chinese and set up an independent kingdom stretching from the Red River delta and Thanh Hoa to the Gate of Annam, when the set about transforming their previous relationship with Campa into trial of strength. After many military campaigns by both sides, the king of Champa was forced in 1000 AD to abandon Indrapura, as it was too close to Vietnamese territory, and move his capital much further south, to Vijaya, in the present-day province of Binh Dinh. From the elevent century onwards Champa was subjected to relentless pressure by the Dai Viêt. It was attacked in 1021 and again in 1026. A further onslaught occured in 1044 when the Vietnamese king, on the pretext of punishing Champa for a maritime raid on its shore attacked, seized and pillaged Vijaya, killing the monarch. This defeat seems to have sparked off unrest in the south of the country, requiring the despatch of an army to quell a revolt in Panduranga. Some years later, in 1068, the Cham king Rudravarman III mounted an assault on the Vietnamese, who counter-attacked immediately. Their king took command of a fleet, attacked Vijaya and defeated the Cham army, capturing the king and taking him to the Red River delta, where in 1069, in exchange for his freedom, he ceded the region stretching from the Gate Annam to the district around the mountain pass of Lao Bao, to the Vietnamese king Ly Thanh Tông. The Dai Viêt authorities proceeded to transform these lands into new provinces named Dia Ly, Ma Linh and Bo Chinh. 'From then onwards, the northern border of Champa was more or less fixed at Lao Bao pass, as the Chams failed in their attempts in 1103 and 1104 to regain the lost territory'. The last thirty years of the elevent century were marked by internal unrest, including a renewed attempt by Panduranga to gain autonomy. There were also two wars against Cambodia, which was conqured in 1974 and in 1080. In addition, there were internal power struggles, and requirement to send regular tribute to China and to the Vietnamese king. The following century was no less disturbed. After assisting the Khmers with their assault on the Vietnamese, Champa became reconciled with the latter, and in turn was attacked by the army of the Khmer king, who in 1145 captured Vijaya and began the occupation of the entire northern region of Champa. It was liberated in 1149 by the king of Panduranga who had installed himself on the throne of viyaya, but had to struggle for the remainder of his reign against internal adversaries, and against the principalities of Amaravati and Panduranga itself, which resented his consecration as 'king of kings' at Vijaya.

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Following the king's death, his successor decided to mount a surprise attack on Cambodia. He assembled a powerful fleet and sailed up the Mekong and Tonlé Sap rivers to the Great Lake. Angkor was captured and pillaged, and its king killed. The Khmer kingdom could well have succumed to this catastrophe, but instead it was saved by a prince who, some years later, was to be crowned Khmer king with the name of Jayavarman VII. He proceeded to rout the Cham army of occupation in a series of battles, including the naval encounter which is commemorated on the relief friezes of Bayon and Banteay Chmar. Continuing his revenge, he took Vijaya in 1190, captured its king, installed his own brother-in-law on the throne, and awarded the throne of Panduranga to one of its young princes. Champa was thus split in two, but a revolt in 1192, the king of Panduranga killed the king of Vijaya and assumed both crowns. Palace revolutions ensued, and in 1203, Angkor reasserted its tutelage over Champa, which was to keep its status as a Khmer province until 1220. The date marks the end of a century of fratricidal strife between the two Hinduised kingdoms, which were from then on to develop good-neighbourly relations. In 1283 Champa experienced the invasion of the Mongols and its king was forced to retreat with his troops to the Annam Cordillera. As Marco Polo records, Champa avoided open t and left the coastal plains to the invaders who, two year later, were forced to retreat. The fourteenth century: the exploits of Chê Bông Nga Champa had endured seventeen years of Khmer occupation and two years of occupation by the Mongols, plus a Vietnamese assault, without giving up an inch of land, but at the beginning of the fourteenth century it was to suffer the loss of its northern region. This misfortune occurred at the whim of its monarch Jaya Simhavarman III (known to the Vietnamese as Chê Man) who in 1386, according to the Vietnamese chronicles, offered the Dai Viêt king the two administrative regions of O and Ly - the territory between the Lao Bao Pass and the Pass of the Clouds - in exchange for the hand of his daughter, Princess Huyên Trân. Fate decreed that the king was to die within a year of the arrival of the princess at the court of Vijaya. She promptly returned to her home country. This sudden change of fortune led the dead king's successors to make repeated attempts to recover these lands, in 1311-12, 1317-18, once again in 1326, and finally in 1353, but all ended in failure. At this point a Cham king whose political finesse was matched by his cunningness as a strategist, Chê Bông Nga, appeared on the scene. He should not be confused with the Po Binasuar mentioned in the Royal Chronicles of Panduranga (a mistake made by all scholars over the last century). Chê Bông Nga appears to have ascended the throne around the year 1360. Taking advantage of the benevolent neutrality of the first emperor of the newly-established Ming dynasty in China, he threw himself into a series of campaign against the Dai Viêt, beginning in 1361, each one of which ended in victory. In 1361 he sacked the port of Di Ly, and 1362 and 1365 it was the turn of the Hoa district. He defeated the Vietnamese army at Chiem Dong in 1368, and in 1370 he invaded the Red River delta, taking Thang Long, the Vietnamese capital. In 1376 he again invaded Hoa, and in 1377 he routed the Dai Viet army as it marched on Vijaya, killing king Trân Duê Tông, its commander. In the same year he invaded the Red River delta and once more overwhelmed the royal army which had attempted to halt his advance, capturing and pillaging the capital for a second time. In 1380 he pillaged the Vietnamese province of Nghê An, Diên Châu and

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Thanh Hoa, returning to wreak further havoc in Thanh Hoa in 1382. He launched another attack on the delta region in 1383 inflicting a further defeat on the royal army. He thrusted into Thanh Hoa once more in 1389, defeating the army sent to confront him. But in 1390 he was betrayed by a minor mandarin in his entourage and was killed by soldiers of the Dai Viêt. His most prominent general, named in the Vietnamese annals as La Ngai, succeeded him under the name of Jaya Simhavarman Sri Harijatti. During his reign which lasted until 1400, Champa was to relinquish to the Dai Viêt all the lands north of the Pass of the Clouds reconquered by Chê Bông Nga. In Maspero's 1928 book Le Royaume du Champa (The Kingdom of Champa) the author characterises the period 1360-1390 as the zenith of the kingdom. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. The reign of Chê Bông Nga was merely a brilliant hiatus, temporarily casting a veil over the moribund state into which Hindunised Champa had sunk towards the end of the fourteenth century. Its civilisation had for many years been in decline, due to the impoverishment of the Sanskrit culture which had underpinned the country's Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, and had provided the bedrock for Cham political and social structure. "The latest Sanskrit inscription so far discovered is dated 1252, and Champa's cultural decline was partly a result of the Muslim invasions of the late twelfth century in India, severing its links with Indochina and thus strangling the cultural contact which had over the centuries breathed new life into the civilisation of Hindunised Champa. The latter was also in decline because the country's defeats in warfare during the thirteenth century at the hands of the Khmers, the Vietnamese and the Chineses, had damaged the credibility of the Hinduist order, which was held to have been ordained by the gods themselves. The people graually lost their faith in it, and the spritual values on which Hinduised Champa had depended were unndermined, thus contributing still further to the country's destablisation in the thirteenth century. The explains why the heroic exploits of Chê Bông Nga were destined to be no avail. The fifteenth century to 1471: the demise of Hinduised Champa No sooner had Jaya Simhavarman Sri Harijatti's son assumed power than the royal Vietnamese army attacked Champa. The Chams were forced to yield the principality of Amaravati which correspanded approximately to the southern part of today's Quang Nam province plus the northern part of Quang Ngai. The Ming Chinese assault on the Dai Vietn in 1407 and the revolt led by Le Loi to regain Vietnamese independence offered a respite to the Chams, who temporarily reasserted control over Amaravati. But the conflict between the two states was reignited in 1445 and led to the captue of Vijaya by the Dai Viêt. From then on, Champa's decline gathered momentum. It suffered incessant raids at the hands of the Dai Viêt, and also internecine striffe, with five monarch in succesion ascending the throne in a mere thirty years. The final blow came in 1471. In retaliation for an attack by the Cham king, the Vietnamese king Lê Thânh Tông mounted a carefullyprepared two-pronged attack by land and sea, putting the Cham army to flight. He captued Vijaya and razed it to the ground, beheading more than forty thousand people, and deporting more than thirty thousand others. He then embarked on the systematic destruction of everything connected with Hinduised Cham culture, thus wiping it out comletely.

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The ultimate capture of Vijaya marked 'the end of a long struggle. lasting half a millenium, which had pined the Hinduism civilisation of Champa againts the Chinaorientated civilisation of the ethnic Vietnamese, as they pushed inexorably southwards. Fo both protagonisy the struggle was a matter of their very survival, and from the final year of the tenth century it witnessed the progressive retreat of the Chams in the face of overwhelming Vietnamese demographic pressure. 1471 is therefore the date of the definitive victory of a culture of Chinese origin, over a Hinduised society which had, from the fourt century AD, held sway over the eastern part of peninsular Indochina. After this terminal desctruction of Vijaya, the victor king Lê Thânh Tông sent troops to Thach Bi hill, at the tip of Cape Varella, where they erected a boundary stone to mark the new southern frontier of the Dai Viêt. But in fact the king's zone of occupation did not extend further south than the Cu Mong pass, leaving the region between it and Thach Bi as a sort of noman's-land between the two countries. It might have been expected that after such an overwhelming victory the Dai Viêt would annex the whole territory of Champa. Indedd this was the erroneous view of many scholars during the first three-quaters of the 20th century, who maintained that Champa dissapeared with the final capture of Vijaya. But the Vietnamese annals relate that king Lê Thânh Tông relinguished his southern territories to one of Vijaya's military commanders. Bo Tri Tri, who had taken refuge in Panduranga and asked to be placed under Dai Viêt suzerainty. Such an act of magnanimity on the king's part might seem surprising until one recalls that after each conquest, The Dai Viêt authorities would invariably spend a number of years consolidating their gains with the help of colonies of soldiers-turned-farmers whose task was to make them viable and defend them against attempts by their former owners to repossess their lost territory. These colonists were also required to repopulate the land with exiles, vagabonds and destitute. It should furthermore be recognised that in the second half of the fifteenth century the Dai Viêt had neither the human nor the material resources to control the whole of ancient Champa. The king therefore showed great foresight in limiting his annexation to the part of it which was nearest to his own domain, and which his army had devastated and depopulated. He knew that he could integrate it into his kingdon with litthe difficulty. 1471-1653: the loss of Kauthara When the Vietnamese ceded the lands of Kauthara, Panduranga and the highlands to the west to Bo Tri Tri, they were in fact allowing him to rebuild a kingdom, which he duly formalised by gaining the investiture of the Chinese emperor, just before his death in 1478. He had two direct successors, if the Chinese sources can be trust, although the latter only given their names in the Chinese language and omit any mention of the dates of their reigns. The royal chronicles of Panduranga, written in Cham language, speak of following monarch: Po Kabih (1494-1530), Po Karutdrak (1530-1536), Po Maha Sarak (1536-1541), Po Kunarai (1541-1553) and Po At (1553-1579). The kingdom which Bo Tri Tri and his successors established in the southern part of former Champa kept its old name, attested both in the Cham documents and the Vietnamese annals, but must be distinguished from the preceding kingdom in its adoption of novel spritual values and a new social structure quite alien from those which had been the basis of Hinduised Champa. The 'new' Champa

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drew on a mixture of ideas from the old native beliefs of the south, from elements of Indian culture which had been to some extent assimilated by the people of that region, and (from the seventeenth century onwards) from various Muslim concepts which had become available after the arrival of Islam in the ports and cities of Panduranga and Kauthara. - The death of Lê Thânh Tông in 1497 sparked off a power struggle among the Dai Viêt which led to the decay of the monarchy and three centuries of armed hostility between the Trinh lords who governed the north of the century, and the Nguyên who had established their capital near present-day Hué. The latter took it upon themselves to resume the Vietnamese thrust against Kauthara and Panduranga, in an attempt to move their border ever further southwards. They encountered resistance from the sovereigns of the 'new Champa' who in 1578 even managed to send an expeditionary force to the north, as far as present-day Phu Yen, to reoccpy a citadel which the Nguyên had captured. At the end of the sixteenth century, new Champa's northern border extended as far as the Cu Mong pass, and its rulers were confident enough to send troops overseas. In 1594 the king, who apparently had been converted to Islam, sent help to the Sultan of Johore in the far south of the Malay peninsula to support his struggle against the Portuguese of Malacca. This new confidence in Cham power was probably what impelled king Po Nit (1603-13) to make forays into Quang Nam, the territory of the Nguyên. These provoked a violent reaction from the Nguyen ruler who mounted a lightning campaign in 1611, capturing the northern part of Kauthara from the Cu Mong pass to mount Thach Bi and Cape Varella. He turned the territory into frontier province, Tran Biên, and installed thirty thousand Vietnamese captives, former partisans of the Trinh, to populate it. The defeat did not diminish the Cham rulers taste for the warfare, and from 1620 onwards they resumed their harassment of the Nguyên-dominated population who had settled in the south of Tran Biên (present-day Phu Yen). In 1653, king Po Nraup was preparing an attack to recapture the lands that had been lost in 1611, when the Nguyên ruler attacked him first, defeated and seized him, and locked him into an iron cage, in which the king then committed suicide. Although in that war the Nguyên army had advanced as far south as the Phan Rang river, the eventual frontier was established further north in the district of Cam Ranh. The Nguyên had thus seized the remaining territory of Kauthara, which thereafter became the provinces of Thau Kang and Dien Khanh. At the end of 1653, the only remaining land belonging to Champa was Panduranga. 1653-1771: the disintegration of Panduranga Five years after annexing Kauthara, the Nguyên tookk advantage of internal strife in Cambodia to seized its easternmost territory, the region now known as Biên Hoa. This 'present a new challege for Panduranga, since there are now Vietnamese territories to the south as well as to the north. The powerful Nguyen could not endure this de facto splitting of their territory indefinitely. This explains why, in 1692, when king Po saut of Panduranga-Champa attempted to reconquer the former Kauthara, the Nguyên ruler sent three armies to confront him, seize his kingdom, and annex it to southern Vietnamese lordship. The latter chaged the name of Chiêm Thành, and substituted Trân (boundary) of Thuân Thành, placing it under the administration of the three military mandarins who had conquered it. One month later the Nguyên ruler transformed it into a prefecture which he

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called Binh Thuân, placing it under the administration of the deposed king's brother, on whom he conferred a Vietnamese mandarin title. Thus at the end of 1692, Panduranga, the last vestige of old Champa, had ceased to exist as an independent country. Despite their overwhelming defeat and their occupation by the Nguyên army, the people of Panduranga revolted in 1693. Realising that it would not be easy to put down this popular aprising, the Nguyên ruler decided in 1694 to annul his annexation. He abolished the Binh Thuân prefecture, re-established Panduranga (which the Vietnamese annals once more reffered to as Thuân Thành) within its former borders, and restored the monarchy (Vuong Hiêu). He then granted investiture to Po Saktiraydaputih (the former governer of Binh Thuan, and brother of King Po Saut who had been captured in 1692), who pledge to pay him an annual tribute. However, despite the lifting of its annexation of Pandurang, the Nguyên court decided to remain in control of all the Vietnamese who had settled there, thus allowing them to keep watch on this community, composed mainly of ragamuffins and poverty-stricken people, and to manipulate it. To accomplish this, the Nguyên ruler established a very unusual prefecture in 1697, to which he restored the name of the former prefecture of Binh Thuân. The administrative documents it issued, in both Chinese and Cham, 'bear witness to the fact that from 1702 there was a Vietnamese administration inside Panduranga's frontiers whose sole purpose was to regulate the lives of the Vietnamese living there. Thenceforth they were no longer subject to the Panduranga ruler but to the Vietnamese mandarins attached to the prefecture, who in addition were entitled to intervene with the ruler to defend any Vietnamese in dispute with the Panduranga administration or with its Cham inhabitants. This state of affairs gave rise to numerous disputes between the native population and the Vietnamese, the more so as the latter gained control of more and more territory, through purchse, of forfeiture of properties pawned by the Chams, or through immigrants settling in areas of fallow land. From then on Panduranga was no longer a defineable geographical unit, but a patchwork scattered with expatriate Nguyên land-holdings. 1771-1832: the death-throes of Champa The popular uprising of the Tay Son people against the Nguyên broke out in 1771, and spread rapidly over all the Nguyên territory, forcing them to abandon Hué and take refuge in the Mekong delta, whence they planned to reconquer their throne. Trapped against its will between the Tay Son and the Nguyen armies, Pandurang-Champa found itself in the midst of a conflict between Vietnamese factions from which it could never gain any conceivable advantage. Indeed, if the Vietnamese annals are to be trusted, one of the main objectives of either side was to occupy Panduranga and thus gain a strategic advantage over the other. Panduranga thus found itself caught in the middle of a battlefield for the whole duration of the war. From then on, to all intents and purposes, its chances of survival as a free country could be rated as almost zero. In 1802 the Nguyên Emperor Gia Long defeated the Tay son and began building his new empire. Between Cam Ranh bay, the region of Ba Ria and the highlands of Donnai, he set up an autonomous zone, extending over the approximate area of the Panduranga of the 1770s, placing those parts of it that had not been integrated into the province of Binh Thuân under the rule of a former grand dignitary of Panduranga-Champa. This governor's name

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was Po Sau Nun Can, of Cham ancestry, who had been an erstwhile companion of Gia Long during the war agaisnt the Tay Son. He was granted absolute power over all the nonVietnamese inhabitants of the zone, and the right to recruit a small army under his sole authority, as well as to levy taxes on his subjects. Set up along 'protectorate' lines, Panduranga-Champa seems to have been reconstituted by the Nguyên emperor "more as a sort of field to reward his companion's faithful services than as a genuine attempt to rebuild Panduranga as a country. Whatever the motive, these lands enjoyed a very considerable degree of autonomy throughout the reign of Gia Long, under the emperor's own protection and that of the viceroy of Gia Dinh Thành, lê Van Duyêt. This situation was not to outlast the death of Gia Long in 1820 and the accession to the throne of his son Mnh Menh, as the latter became embroiled in a struggle for ascendency with the viceroy. Panduranga-Champa was to bear the brunt of the conflict as each side strove to subjugate it, and consequently control the province of Binh Thuân whose lands were interminglede with those of Panduranga. After the death of Po Sau Nun Can in 1822, Minh Menh blocked the promotion of the Cham dignitary who ought by right to have been his successor, and substitued another more to his king. A crisis ensued, followed by an armed insurrection which broke out in Gia Dinh Thành but spread to encompass such a large area that Minh Menh reversed his decision and reinstated the original dignitary as governor of Panduranga-Champa. On the latter's death in 1828, Panduranga became once more the pawn of a political struggle between the emperor and the viceroy of Gia Dinh Thành. Minh Menh nominated as governor a Cham who enjoyed his confidence, but Lê Van Duyêt had him replaced by the son of Po Sau Nun Can who was completely in his thrall, as proved by the fact thenceforth he paid the taxes normally due to the emperor, to Gia Dinh Thành instead. It can thus be said that 1828 marks a turning-point in relations between the land of the Vietnamese and Panduranga. Whilst from 1822-1828 the latter was "subject solely to the court of Hué, it was from then on to become tributary to Gia Dinh Thành. The fate of Panduranga-Champa was thus bound to that of Lê Van Duyêt. The latter died in 1832, and Minh Menh seized the opportunity to retake the whole of Pandurang-Champa, punishing not only the officials who had opted for the viceroy of Gia Dinh Thành, but also the people, whose paddy-fields were confiscated and who were subjected to forced labours. As to Panduranga-Champa itself, Minh Menh decided to wipe it off the map altogether, and divided its lands by attaching them and their inhabitants to the two administrative regions of An Phuoc and Hoa Da in Binh Thuân province. By the end of 1832, Champa had finally ceased to exist. 1833-1835: the final uprisings The mandarins sent by Minh Menh to punish the former partisans of Lê Van Duyêt, namely the inhabitants of Gia Dinh Thành and Panduranga, imposed harsh measures which unleashed a wave of uprisings throughout the south from 1833 onwards. In former Panduranga the rebellion, which had its roots in the misery of a people reduced to despair, was diverted by its instigator, Katip Sumat, to advance the cause of Islam. A Muslim religious official, he turned the revolt into what became in effect a jihad or holy war. It was

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a major uprising. The chronicles record that as well as the troops despatched to suppress it, the Vietnamese of the province of Binh Thuân were also called in to ensure victory, achived between the end of 1833 and the beginning of 1834. While this insurrection takes up little space in Vietnamese historiography, the reverse is true of its successor in 1834-1835, which discarded the guise of a classical revolt and assumed that of a 'war of liberation'. Its instigator was Ja Thak Va whose sole aim was to free his country from the domination of Minh Menh and restore all that had destroyed under his rule. His first step was to begin rebuilding the organs of a 'state'. In a mountainous region where the troops of the Huê court did not dare venture, he convoked an assembly which appointed a king, an heir to the throne and a commander-in-chief. Next he assembled the hill-tribes of the high plateaux and the Chams of the coastal plain, launching two attacks on Minh Menh's army and gaining the freedom of almost all the lands of old Panduranga. Despite repeated attempts by the Hué court to entice the insurgents to capitulate, the conflict wnt on until mid-1835, when Ja Thak Va was killed, not long after the king he had crowned had suffered the same fate. Although the deaths of these two leaders of the revolt did not immediately cause it collapse, they had dealt it a mortal blow. The ensuing repression of Ja Thak Va's adherents was ferocious. Ming Menh's troops seized their assets, hunted them down, starved them, deported them, killed them, burned their villages and desecrated their cemeteries. For good measure and to ensure no further uprisings, the Hué court split up the survivors village into hamlets which it then scattered among Vietnamese villages. "The result was the dispersion of the hill-tribes people around the territory, and the destruction of the framework of Cham culture and of its society, both of which had been rooted in Champa's ancestral lands". The Cham kingdom, which gradually declined under the onslaught of the Vietnamese as they expanded southwards, has left only its archaelogical remains and two definable human communities. Firstly, some 300,000 people live on the high plateaux of central Vietnam. They comprise hill-tribes whose languages belong to the Austronesian language family, including the Jörai, the Edê, the Cru and the Raglai, and other ethnic group who speak languages of the Austroasiatic group, including the Ma, the Sré and the Stieng. The second community is the Chams, with some 80,000 people living in the central Vietnam province of Binh Thuân and Ninh Thuan, 15,000 in the Chau Doc regionn and Ho Chi Minh City in south Vietnam, and about 150,000 who have settled in Cambodia, where their forebears had been migrants from Kauthara adn Panduranga in the seventeenth century and in subsequent times. Culture By Prof. P-B. Lafont Only the inscriptions in Sanskrit or “old Cham” provide any information regarding Cham culture during the Indianized period. And since they deal only with the culture of the court and leadership classes, we are in the dark as to the cultural lives of the mass of the population, be they residents of the coast or of the highlands. As with all other human societies of the past, the culture of the elite of Champa was dominated by its religious practices. It was influenced to a great degree by Indian culture,

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and from India the upper castes of Champa borrowed their concepts of the organization of the cosmos and drew the major part of the elements of their civilization from Sanskrit literature. The inscriptions paint a reasonably clear picture of the culture of the aristocracy, which was centered on a knowledge of Sanskrit and of Pânini’s grammar and the Mahâbhâsya, which were used by the elite in the normal course up to the 12th century, when Jaya Harivarman wrote poetry in Sanskrit and when a Sanskrit chronicle in sloka, known as the Arthapurânasastra, was written (L. Finot, “Les inscriptions de Mỹ-sơn”, in BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 963-964). Culture involved familiarity with the classic Indian epic poems, in particular the Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyana, which appear to have enjoyed great popularity at the royal court, as the inscriptions, which often include quotations from them, would seem to suggest. This is shown in the inscription from the 7th century dedicated to the author of the epic poem of Râma (P. Mus, « L'inscription à Vâlmîki de Prakâçadharma (Trâ-kiệu », in B.E.F.E.O. XXVIII, 1928, pp. 147-152), whose cult appears to have been more literary than religious. An erudite individual would also be familiar with the Dharmasâstra, from which the law drew its principles and practices, as well as technical treatises and the science of magic (E. Huber, “L’épigraphie de la dynastie de Đồng-dương”, in BEFEO XI, 1911, pp. 291, 296 and 303-309). Another important element of the culture was astronomy, which is believed to have been the domain of specialists, no doubt Brahmins. This was especially important inasmuch as it was used for the measurement of timec – Champa used the lunar/solar year and the Indian saka, which commences in year 78 of the Christian Era, as the starting date – and for preparing the calendar, which was essential for magico-religious purposes since determined the dates of all the ceremonies and the times for the performance of all kinds of rituals and, most importantly, determined which days were propitious, which were unlucky, and which were neutral – which in turn determined how virtually everyone conducted his or her daily life (L. Finot, “Inscriptions du Quảng-Nam”, in BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 107, 109). Alongside this high culture, which was officially the elite culture until the 15th century, there existed a parallel culture, that of the mass of the population of Champa, which did not have access to the fount of knowledge of the aristocracy. This mass culture, of which we know very little, took its roots from the civilization of Lin-yi, which during the 3rd and 4th centuries was enriched by techniques originating in China with a light Indian overlay. In the course of the centuries to follow, it absorbed important influences brought by sailors plying their trade along the great maritime route linking India and the Middle East with Europe, who stopped in Champa’s coastal cities, which lay along the route, to take on provisions. This mass culture, which developed on the fringes of the official Sanskrit culture, would little by little entirely replace the latter, of which the first element to disappear – and the most important – was the Sanskrit language. The final Sanskrit inscription dates from 1253, after which only inscriptions in “old Cham” can be found. But this disaffection with Sanskrit arose much earlier: from the beginning of the 9th century, inscriptions in this language became less and less frequent, and less and less respectful of proper grammar. In turn, classical literature in turn fell into oblivion, either forgotten totally – as was the case with the Mahâbhârata, from which no citations can be found from the beginning of the 13th century – or partially, like the great epic poem Râmâyana, which survived only in an abbreviated prose version (which has come down to us in modern times

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under the title Pram Dit Pram Lak). Finally, the closer we come to the end of the 15th century and the collapse of Indianized Champa, the more the culture originating in India was superseded by what I will call the indigenous culture. Beginning with the 16th century, when Champa found itself reduced to the territories of Kauthâra and Pânduranga, the cultural elements of Indian origin in their original forms disappeared almost entirely. Practically the sole exception, and a surprising one, was the rite of sati. It was recorded for the first time in 1081 on the occasion of the death of Harivarman (IV), when fourteen women of his entourage were immolated on the funeral pyre following the cremation of his remains (L. Finot, “Les inscriptions de Mĩ-sơn XIIC” in BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 936 and 939), and again by the Franciscan Odoric de Pordenone in the first part of the 14th century; its continued existence was noted again in the middle of the 17th century. Indeed, an inscription engraved on a statue in the temple of Po Rome in Phan-rang, believed to be that of this king’s first wife, reveals that the latter had not followed her husband on the funeral pyre, which leads one to believe that the rite was still practiced at that time at the court of Champa. We do not know when this practice involving human sacrifice was abandoned; it was replaced among certain Chams Ahiér by another form of sacrifice, that of manuscripts owned by the deceased, which were thrown by his widow on the funeral pyre during his cremation so as to accompany him in the world of the beyond – a ritual which is responsible for the disappearance of numerous major classical works of which only the names are now known (Po Dharma, Nicolas Weber, Abdullah Zakaria Bin Ghalizi, Akayet Um Marup, KKKW & EFEO, 2006, p. 9). A few other cultural elements, mostly of a juridical nature, continued to exist as a framework for the society which replaced the Indianized kingdom. The remaining elements did not survive. They were replaced by those which had always existed in the popular culture, to which were incorporated the indigenous cultural elements associated with the land of the southern part of Champa and then by contributions from the Malay peninsula and islands, which were all the more easily accepted because they came from a people with whom the coastal inhabitants of Champa had long been in contact and with whom were anthropologically, linguistically and culturally very close. As we have already noted, it was above all the rituals and religious beliefs which changed. A whole multitude of local genies (yang) were transformed into official divinities to whom sacrifices, normally involving the killing of animals, were made by all levels of society. In addition, there were important ceremonies such as kate, cambur (CAM 125-1) and the festival of the first plowing, which was required to desanctify the soil, which had lain follow during the winter season, prior to planting the new crop. This was the situation when, between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, Moslem travelers began converting some of the people living along the coast. But while in principle this should have resulted in a thorough Islamization of the converts, this is not what happened; for while the converts adopted certain elements of Islam, they did not totally abandon their native religious beliefs, and what resulted was a “Moslem” culture that was a mixture of elements adopted from Islam and traditional local practice. At the same time, the practitioners of the local religion – the Cham Ahiér – took personages from the Islam religion and transformed them into local deities: Allah became Po Uvalvah (CM 27-27) and was included among the original kings in their historical legends, and

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Mohammed became Po Rasulak (CM 39-1) and was incorporated along with other Koranic personalities in the Ahiér pantheon. One is faced with a complicated system of beliefs, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. As a result, the various observations made by outsiders concerning the two belief systems are not always consistent. The coexistence of these two belief systems would have a direct influence on various aspects of the culture of the Cham of present-day central Vietnam. For example, since the 17th century, the Cham Bani no longer ascribe to the same cosmogony as the Cham Ahiér and no longer see the creation of the world in the way they did before their conversion (CAM 97-2 and CAM 143-2). Furthermore, although they both calculate time using the twelve animals and the sixty-year cycle, the Ahiér and Bani now use calendars that have been calculated differently and are no longer in accord with one another (CAM 138-4). It should also be noted that the religious authorities have the habit of moving the dates of certain important festivals observed by both communities from the dates on which they would normally be celebrated – for example, the rija – if the festival were to fall within a period considered unpropitious for festivities by the Bani (for example, during Ramadan). Other cultural elements took form at this time, notably as regards the language, with “old Cham” being replaced from the beginning of the 16th century by “middle Cham” and its various forms of writing, which from then on became the sole means of expression in writing. Because of this, from then on all literary expression was in Cham, whether it be of the epic themes drawn from the common culture of the ancient Indianized states of southeast Asia, describing the lives of various heroic characters who undergo extraordinary adventures before returning to their home countries and assuming the thrones of their fathers, of which Inra Sri Biklan (CAM microfilm 11-2) is the archtype, or of literary works borrowed from the Malay world, with which the indigenous culture of Champa shared many common elements, and which upon adoption were reworked and adapted to the mentality and to the culture of the Cham. This adaptation was so complete that the Cham people, which was unaware of the existence of the Malay hikayat, had no idea that their akayet – especially the Inra Patra and Deva Mano (Po Dharma, G. Moussay, Abdul Karim, Akayet Dowa Mano, Kuala Lumpur, PNM and EFEO, 1998) – were of foreign inspiration. The evolution described here made its mark on the lesser arts as well. In the field of music, a number of instruments in common use during the Indianized period, such as the vina, the harp and the tambourine which figure among the carved reliefs at Mĩ-sơn and Phong-lệ, disappeared, to be replaced by other instruments such as those used in the cahya orchestra – only the gong survived the transition – many of which appear to have been borrowed from the Malays. In addition, from the 15th century, the art of dancing ceased to be a monopoly of the gods. The carvings of dancing Shiva, such as those seen at Phong-lệ and Khương-mỹ, and the apsaras like those carved on the pedestals of lingas at Chánh-lộ and Trà-kiệu, no longer appeared. Nor were dancers any longer furnished to temples to perform rituals (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 942 and 943). From this time forward, dancing consisted of rhythmic movement performed by females and accompanied by music, such as the dance known as patra. As regards the dances performed nowadays for visitors to the Cham temples, these were created only during the final third of the 20th century and solely for the purpose of entertaining tourists.

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We know nothing of the culture of the Montagnards during the Indianized period, since nothing about it is mentioned in the inscriptions. On the other hand, much is known about the cultural elements which still subsisted at the middle of the 20th century, when, beginning around 1955, large numbers of Vietnamese, fleeing the north of the country and displaced from certain areas in the center and south, resettled in the high plateaus, inundating with their numbers the original inhabitants and destroying the indigenous civilization. For the proto-Indochinese, the universe was animated by innumerable invisible beings who resided in nature, the sky, the earth, and tangible objects and who, after having created the world, continued to rule over it. These beliefs impacted the daily life of the Montagnards, and every activity he undertook, and explains his continuous recourse to religious ceremonies of a sacrificial nature where he believed that, through prayer, he could influence the spirits by neutralizing their malefic intentions or make them favorable (P.-B. Lafont, Prières Jarai, Paris, EFEO, Textes et Documents sur l’Indochine VIII, 1963). These religious cultural elements also appeared in the customs and “dits de justice” of each ethnic group, inasmuch as they were not simply rules to govern social conduct but also to regulate the conduct of each individual both internally and vis-à-vis the invisible beings who presided over the destiny of the world. Indeed, customary law required perfection in each individual. It included not only rules aimed at achieving relative fairness among individuals in their dealings with each other, but also at governing each of their thoughts and their acts. Customs, proverbs about justice and morality thus were all part of the same domain and were intermingled, since for the proto-Indochinese what we call customary law and what we call morality came did not spring from different sources: both were revealed to them by the spirits who governed the universe. For these people, whose languages never had a written form, all knowledge was transmitted orally, be it prayers, customs and proverbs, or literature. Also, in order that the largest number of people could remember them, they were preserved in the form of poems which, when recited, were set to a rhythm which complemented the sound. Rhythm and sound aided in memorization of these works, and as a result a number of literary texts – sayings, tales, legends, narratives and even an epic poem (D. Antomarchi, « Le chant épique de Kdam Yi », in B.E.F.E.O. XLVII-2, 1955, pp. 590-615) – have been preserved to this day. Thanks to this, we are able to state that these works promoted harmony in the society that produced them, the existing economic order and the omnipotence and preeminence of the invisible spirits in the world over which they ruled. Languages By Prof. P-B. Lafont The archeological records at our disposal suggest that all of these proto-Malay people spoke one, or perhaps several, proto-Malayo-Polynesian languages. This language (or languages) gave birth to its modern-day successors: the Cham language, spoken in the lowlands; and the related languages of the area – Jarai, Ede (Rhade), Chru, Raglai, Hroy – spoken in the east-central region of the peninsula.

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There is evidence of the use of the Cham language since the 3rd century CE. It was spoken from the Porte d’Annam (Hoành-sơn) to the present-day region of Bình-thuận, but today its use is limited to the Cham villages of the Vietnamese provinces of Ninh-thuận and Bình-thuận and in the Quatre-Bras lowlands and around Kampot in Cambodia. The language belongs to the Austronesian family of languages (notwithstanding an Austroasiatic substratum). It is, however, evolved considerably over time, notably with the appearance of pre-glottalized consonants, as well as the borrowing of numerous words from Sanskrit, Vietnamese and Khmer, so much so that the language today is much less close to Malay than it was in anient times. The first written evidence of the language dates from the 4th century CE, in the form of a stone inscription discovered near Trà-kiệu in the modern day province of Quảng Nam (G. Coedes, “La plus ancienne inscription en langue chame”, in New Indian Antiquary, Extra Series I, 1939, pp. 46-49), which is written in “old Cham”. This writing, derived from devanâgarî, was used concurrently with Sanskrit up until the 15th century, when inscriptions in Cham disappeared. It was later replaced by “middle Cham”, and then by modern Cham, which uses four writing systems: akhar rik, akhar yok, akhar tuel and akhar srah, the latter of which is in everyday use. They were originally used on palm leaves, and later on paper. (P.-B. Lafont, Po Dharma and Nara Vija, Catalogue des manuscrits cam des bibliotheques françaises, Paris, Publications de l’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient, vol. CXIV, 1977, pp. 2, 6-8 and CM 23-2). In Vietnam, there are notable differences between the written and spoken languages. The written language shows greater proximity to proto-Malayo-Polynesian than the spoken language, the latter having evolved toward monosyllabism as a result of the influence of Vietnamese, which is the lingua franca of the Cham. In Cambodia no such distinction between spoken and written Cham exists, but the language has been heavily influenced by Khmer. In the highlands, only two language groups, neither of which have ever existed in written form, are currently used by the proto-Indochinese peoples living there. Several of these languages are within the Chamic group (Jarai, Ede, Chru, Raglai, Hroy), and in addition there are a not insignificant number of languages in the Mon-Khmer group which belong to the Austroasiatic family. The former have always been closely related to one another as well as to “old Cham”. They would seem to be languages introduced by conquest, compared to the Austroasiatic languages into whose region they appear to have been thrust (see map). Furthermore, the inscriptions, in Sanskrit as well as Cham, indicate that the speakers of the highland Chamic languages had relationships, sometimes quite close, with the ethnic Cham beginning in the 12th century. In comparison, the oral traditions as of the middle of the 20th century of the Austroasiatic-speaking groups indicate very weak ties historically with the Cham.

Origins By Prof. P-B. Lafont We saw in the previous chapter that contrary to what has been written up to now, Champa included not only the coastal portions of what are now the central and southern areas of Central Vietnam but also, to the west, that part of the Annamite Cordillera which

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bordered the coastal strip and the plateaus that lay just beyond these mountains. Accordingly, the inhabitants of Champa included not only those who lived in the lowlands but those in the highlands as well, the people we customarily call Montagnards or protoIndochinese. The kingdom thus was not, as was thought until recently, the land of the Cham exclusively, but rather a multiethnic country where, as we shall see, each ethnic group played a role. The population of the territory of what used to be Champa at the beginnings of our era is only known in the most general terms. For that part of the country situated between the Porte d’Annam and the Col des Nuages, Chinese documents, which are our only sources, make little mention. They describe the region, which was then at China’s southern border, as inhabited by a few Chinese immigrants and a much larger number of natives living both on the coast and in the mountains. They speak of the latter as maintaining close relationships with one another: the Jinshu (57, 4b, translation by Paul Pelliot) states that “friendly groups help each other out” without providing any details. The Chinese also referred to the natives as “barbarians” – to Chinese writers, all non-Chinese and nonSinicized people were barbarians – and included them within the Qulian people, an imprecise term which implies that the natives had brown-tinted skin. There is rather more information about the part of the country south of Bạch-mã mountain. Human remains found in the highlands in the west of the Annamite Cordillera are those of dolichocephalic proto-Malays, with large bodies. They first came to the area during Neolithic times and are the ancestors of the proto-Indochinese peoples which, until the middle of the 20th century, were the sole inhabitants of highlands. The remains found in the coastal areas are from a second wave of dolichocephalic proto-Malays into which mongoloid elements were introduced by other immigrants coming from what is now China. Also arriving in Neolithic times, these were the people who, after having absorbed many civilizing influences during the proto-historic era up to the Christian era, formed the ethnic group which the West, using Vietnamese terminology (Chàm and Chăm), would erroneously call the Cham. They did so notwithstanding the fact that no ethnic group of this name exists in their own language and can be found nowhere in inscriptions or manuscripts, where the term for the native people is “Urang Champa” (urang = person, individual). However, since this term has been used for more than a century to designate the ethnic group that populated the coastal region of Champa, we will continue to use it with this precise meaning, i.e. it is restricted to the inhabitants of the coastal areas of Champa. Art By Prof. P-B. Lafont It was the monuments scattered across the countryside of what had been Indianized Champa that attracted French scholars who arrived in the lowlands of what is now central Vietnam. Subsequently, the discovery of the mountain complex of Mĩ-sơn and its sixty-six monuments buried in earth and vegetation, as well as the imposing site of Đồng-dương which H. Parmentier and C. Carpeaux would begin to uncover at the beginning of the 20th century (Missions archéologiques françaises au Champa. Photographies et itinéraires 1902-1904, Paris, Les Indes Savantes, 2005), soon led to an understanding of the

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importance of the monumental art of Champa. The discovery of numerous statues and other sculpture during the course of excavations undertaken by scientists and architects of the Ecole Françcaise d’Extrême-Orient in turn the artistic value of these objects, which were inventoried and a large number of which were transferred to a museum founded by H. Parmentier in Tourane (Đà-nẵng). This state of affairs continued until the period beginning at the end of 1969, when a number of the tower/sanctuaries of Mĩ-sơn and Đồng-dương were, along with other important archeological and cultural sites in Indochina, destroyed under the carpet of bombs released by the United States military aviation forces. After the end of the war, the cultural services of the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam undertook the demining and reparation of the some fifteen monuments that could be restored through local efforts. The monumental art that has survived to this day, or of which we have knowledge notwithstanding their destruction thanks to the drawings and rubbings left to us by the pioneers of Cham studies, consists solely of buildings having a religious function, either Hindu or Buddhist. All of these monuments, which, without exception, were royal foundations, followed the same plan: a tower/sanctuary (kalan) housing the statue of a god or a linga, surrounded by subsidiary towers – normally there were two – and often with a small enclosure. The towers are square in form and are built of fired brick, a material of which the Cham were masters throughout their history. However, in the course of the long existence of Indianized Champa, this architectural form evolved, and scholars have classified the different styles and dated them (P. Stern, L’art du Champa (ancient Annam) et son évolution, Toulouse, Douladoure, 1942) according to key indicators that are universally accepted today. From the 3rd century until the 7th, no archeological remains have been found, other than several items of foreign origin such as the magnificent bronze Buddha of Indian origin known as the Đồng-dương Buddha, notwithstanding the fact that Chinese documents of the time inform us that the inhabitants of Champa were past masters of the art of brick construction and that the inscriptions indicate a high level of artistic activity in the country. This would be confirmed by the discovery in the first years of the 20th century of quite beautiful relics dating from the middle of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th, which reflected a style which is called Mĩ-sơn E1 (the letter designating the group of monuments in the Mĩ-sơn circle where the relic was located and the number being the number given to the particular building within the group). This E1 style, analyzed by J. Boisselier (“Arts du Champa et du Cambodge preangkorien. La date de Mĩ-sơn E1” in Arts Asiatiques XIX 3-4, 1956, pp. 197-202), shows a great deal of originality while at the same time reflecting outside influences, notably Indian, Môn (Dvâravâti), Indonesian and PreAngkorian.. It is particularly distinguished for its richly decorated stepped foundations, its carved tympanums and frontons and the decorations of its pedestals. It is also notable for the drape of the clothing worn by the human beings represented in carvings and sculpture and their forms of movement, their adornments and their hair styles. Between the middle of the 8th century and the middle of the 9th, the political center of Champa shifted to its southernmost part (see “History”, infra). There, at the beginning of the 9th century, a new style appeared, designated by the name “Hòa-lai” from the area in Ninh-thuận province where three tower-sanctuaries, of which two remain, were located.

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The towers in this style are square, approximately twenty meters high and rising at the top in stages of ever-decreasing circumference. They are characterized by blind arcades, decorated with, overhanging all of the openings, which consisted of real entrances framed with stone columns and false doors guarded by Dvârapâla. In the final quarter of the 9th century, when the political center of the country shifted back to the north, this style, which was unique to the southern territories of Champa, would be supplanted by a new and particularly impressive style, that of Đồng-dương. The temple of Đồng-dương, totally destroyed by the American army during the second Indochina war, was the most imposing and most original monument of Champa. This monastery of Mahayana Buddhism was built between 875 and the beginning of the 9th century. A map of the sanctuary can be found in AFAO-EFEO, Le Musée de sculpture cam de Đà-Nẵng (Paris, AFAO, 1997, pp. 68-69). Within an interior space 1300 meters long were situated a number of fired brick edifices grouped in several sections. A large part of the surface areas of these buildings, nearly all of which were decorated with bas-reliefs, was covered with leaf decoration – an essential element of the Đồng-dương monumental style was this sinuous leaf pattern which ornamented the otherwise undecorated portion of the buildings. This style can be found in two other Buddhist sanctuaries of the same period, those of Đại-hữu and Mĩ-đức. The next succeeding monumental style, which covers the 10th century, is called Mĩsơn A1 and is divided into two periods: the first is named Khương-mĩ and the second, Tràkiệu. The first of these two periods derives its name from three tower-sanctuaries notable for their architectural harmony and the ornamentation of which marks a transition between that of Đồng-dương and that of the following period. The Mĩ-sơn A1 style represents the full blossoming of monumental art in Champa, the most notable example of which was the tower-sanctuary denominated A1 in the Mĩ-sơn archeological complex, considered to be Champa’s most beautiful monument in brick and reduced to cinders by the bombs of the United States military. The Mĩ-sơn A1 style, represented in a number of buildings in areas A, B, C and D of the Mĩ-sơn complex (the map of which can be found in AFAO-EFEO, op. cit., pp. 72-73), shows a balance between the very clean lines of the structure with decorative mouldings on the wall panels and antefixes shaped like flames at the corners of each of the tower’s successively higher and smaller levels. The second period of this style made its debut in the foundation of tower-sanctuary A1 and was continued in the designs ornamenting the foundations and tympanums of other monuments; the ensemble of the octagonal sanctuaries known as Chánh-lộ is the most representative of this period, which terminated with the tower-sactuary of Po Nagar in Nha-trang dating from the beginning of the 11th century. Following its golden age in the 10th century, the monumental art of Champa underwent a long period of transition, marked from the beginning of the 12th century by a gradual decline which accelerated during the 13th century. This new style, referred to as the Bình-định style (from the province where it is most usually found) or the Tháp-mẫm (the name of a sanctuary) style, is represented inter alia by the five “silver towers” with their blind arcades in the form of fers-de-lance, the three “ivory towers” (Vietnamese: Dươnglong) whose lintels are copied from those of the Bayon at Angkor, the “copper tower” (Vietnamese: Cánh-tiên) and the “gold tower” (Vietnamese: Thốc-lộc). This style is characterized by an increase in the number of blind arcades and by the frequent appearance

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of friezes decorated with images of mythical animals. Moreover, the style, which shows a certain heaviness, is dominated by what P. Stern has called the “motif of Tháp-mẫm”, a snail-shaped design ending with a hook. Monumental art then began a period of decadence, which accelerated over time. The style became dated, and bit by bit lost its elegance. This final style commences with the construction of the Po Klong Garai temple, which has a well-developed and rudimentary statuary, and continues with the southern tower of Po Nagar, whose sculptures are quite mediocre, and with the temples of Yang Prong and Yang Mum in the Montagnard regions. The final example of this period is the kalan called Po Rome which, in spite of its name, dates from the end of the 15th century or at the latest at the beginning of the 16th. The last building to be constructed with durable materials, it is architecturally nothing more than a pile of brick cubes. The statuary of Champa, of which we know a great deal by virtue of the number of pieces (statues, panels, pedestals, lintels, bas-reliefs) that have been uncovered since the end of the 19th century – the majority of which, following discovery, were transferred to the museum in Đà-nẵng or the Musee Guimet in Paris, thereby escaping destruction in the war waged by the Americans – have been the subject of numerous and abundantly illustrated publications, of which the most important is La statuaire du Champa. Recherches sur les cultes et l’iconographie (Paris, Publications de l’EFEO, vol. LIV, 1963) by J. Boisselier. These works present and discuss such a large number of objects that we are only able in a work of this scope to mention the most remarkable of them. Among the pieces in the style of Mĩ-sơn E1 is a very beautiful pedestal found in the center of the temple in 1903, whose excellently worked decoration on all of its sides shows a dancer, some musicians and a number of other figures, as well as a remarkable fronton showing a reclining Vishnu with a lotus giving birth to Brahma growing from his navel. Objects in the Hòa-lai style (middle of the 8th century to the middle of the 9th) are rare, and outside of the two Dvârapâla of the Hòa-lai tower they consist almost exclusively of small bronze Buddhist statues of Indonesian influence representing Avalokitesvara. In contrast, the Đồng-dương style produced some of Champa’s most important statuary. It includes representations of the Buddha as well as scenes from his life, of monks, of saints (many of which have been decapitated ) wearing monastic garb, and a variety of other figures, Dvârapâla wearing sampots, characters lacking individualized visages, and finally real or mythical animals (elephants, naga, makara, etc.). Male persons are shown with flat noses and thick lips topped with a bushy moustache. As is the also the case with males, females are represented without smiles. Their bare upper torsos are adorned with shapely hemispheric breasts and the lower body is draped in a sarong that falls to the ankles. One of the most beautiful examples of this style – perhaps the most beautiful – is a large bronze statue 120 centimeters in height that was excavated in 1978 and which has been the subject of a study by J. Boisselier (“Un bronze de Târâ du musée de Đà-nẵng et son importance pour l’histoire de l’art du Champa” in BEFEO LXXII, 1984, pp. 319-337, 5 plates). This Târâ, which has a rather severe countenance, voluminous breasts and is clothed in a twolayered skirt falling to the top of her feet, is a remarkable work, and represents the union of a style that is typically Cham with influences from China and India. The succeeding style of Mĩ-sơn A1, which is dated from the 10th century, is during its first period (that of Khương-mĩ) characterized by figures with smiles much broader than had previously been

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the case, with more jewelry (necklaces, earrings, etc.) and, in the case of male figures, dressed in sampots reaching only to the knees. One of the most beautiful statues of this period is the stone bust called the devî of Hương-quế, whose hair is adorned with the lunar crescent that identifies her as the sakti of Shiva. During certain ceremonies, this statue would be decorated with items of gold jewelry on the head and ears. This period was one of transition towards that called the Trà-kiệu period, when sculpture showed a true commonality of style in the representations of humans, whose hair is bound in chignons and covered with chignon caps and often with a diadem; of mythical persons (who are found only in high relief and bas-relief); of apsara who appear to be wearing nothing but jewelry; and real and mythical animals (garuda, nandin, lions, kâla, elephants, etc.) in various poses. One of the chefs-d’oeuvre of this style is the “Pedestal of the Dancers”, where each upper pilaster is decorated with a beautiful and highly original sculpture of a dancing girl; it is a true artistic masterpiece. The ensuing Tháp-mẫm style is found in statuary of artistic importance in which, contrary to the preceding style, Indo-Javanese influences are absent. The representations of divinities, ascetics and apsara in this style are, and always were, attached to temples and were decorated with the hair style, vestments (a short sampot and a vest hugging the upper torso) and ornaments (in particular, earrings and belts) peculiar to this style. Animals, generally mythical ones (gajasimha, makara, dragons, etc.) frequently are seen in the statuary, normally more or less stylized in appearance. This style is also well known for one of its motifs, unique in Southeast Asia: rows of female breasts, hemispheric in shape, which adorn pedestals which, originally, supported a linga. For the 14th and 15th centuries we have very few examples of sculpture, which are moreover rather mediocre in quality. Representations of human beings are, for the most part, only found in high relief – their legs becoming less and less visible – and are shown wearing a diadem or a miter, with a large mouth and semi-circles for eyes. Among the statuary from this final era of the Indianized period are the Shiva of Drang Lai (Đắc-lắc) and Yang Mum (Công-tum). Finally, we should mention the presents given by the monarchs to the sanctuaries in addition to statuary: jewelry made from gold and silver for the adornment of idols as well as vases, jugs and various metal containers needed for the performance of rituals. Very little of the handiwork of the court goldsmiths and jewelers, who worked in “gold, silver, brass and copper” has survived; in the course of the numerous wars in which Champa was involved, precious metals and jewels were taken by enemy armies as booty. And in taking these items from the gods to whom they had previously been dedicated, they were deemed to have deprived the country of the protection of these gods. In spite of this, we are aware of the existence of these objects since the inscriptions made at the time of donation mention not only the donor and the recipient but also provide a very detailed description, including the weight, of the objects that are being offered to the divinities. The following excerpt from “Les inscriptions de Mĩ-sơn XVI B” translated by L. Finot (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 948 and 950-51), which describes the offering of a kosa (a sheath made of precious metal to put on a linga) in 1010 sakarâja, provides an example: “H.M. Sri Jaya Indravarmadeva, knowing that the god Bhadresvara is the master of all things visible in this world, had a gold kosa with six faces (sanmukha) made,

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decorated with a nâga ornament (nâgabhûsana) and colored jewels set in the points of the diadems. And the thing we call ûrdhvakasa is made of magnificent gold. And an âdhâra (support) was made for it, with a sun stone (sûryakânti) at the top of the diadem. The face turned (?) to the East has a ruby…at the peak of the diadem, and a nagarâja ornament. The faces turned to NE and SE have a sapphire…in the eye of the nagarâja and at the peak of the diadem. [The face] turned to the South has a ruby at the peak of the diadem. [The face] turned to the West has a topaz at the peak of the diadem. [The face] turned to the North has a pearl (? uttaratna). This gold kosa contains 314 thil and 9 dram…of gold; the six faces, with the diadems, the nagarâja [which is] above, and the âdhâra ûrdhvamukha weigh 136 thil; in total 450 thei 9 dram.” The discovery in 1995 of the cargo of a shipwreck south of the island of Palawan (Philippines) also provides evidence that around the 15th century, the area of Vijaya produced and exported – to countries of the region and even beyond – ceramics from from Gò-sành and the surrounding region (K. Morimura, “Ceramics Salvaged from a Sunken Vessel of Pandanan Island in Philippines” in Trade Ceramic Studies No. 16, 1996, p. 111-125) . And if, as one hypothesis would have it – a doubtful one, in our opinion – the production of ceramics continued during the 16th century, it was certainly the only art form to survive – temporarily –the collapse of Indianized Champa. Indeed, after 1471, there would be no further construction of sanctuaries, no more sculpture, no more production of jewelry. Nothing survived of what had previously contributed to the explosion of artistic creativity in Champa. And the solitary example of the art of indigenous Champa, the Kut, which mark the cemeteries of the matrilineal clans (Nghiêm Thẩm, “Tôn-giáo của người Chàm tại Việt Nam” in Quê Hương 34, 4-1962, pp. 108-123), provide no evidence to the contrary. These markers, which look like stelae, sometimes are shaped in a form that is vaguely human, and sometimes are engraved (with varying degrees of skill) with a representation of a human face, but the vast majority are decorated only with a simple border. They are far from being works of art, even though a few art historians have made mention of them. The Economy By Prof. P-B. Lafont There exists only scattered documentation concerning the economy of Champa, whether before or after the 15th century; the writers evidenced little interest in the subject. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify two economies that existed side by side: a subsistence economy of farmers and coastal fishermen in which the mass of the population lived, and an economy involving trade with foreign merchants which existed for the benefit of the court, The principal economic activity of the country’s inhabitants was agricultural production, in which the majority of the population of the lowlands and all of the Montagnards were involved. For the most part this meant rice farming (in all of the countries in this region, to consume food was expressed not by the word “eat” standing

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alone but by the words “eat rice”). According to the inscriptions, riziculture was practiced in the lowlands on irrigable lands, the existence of which we are aware because such lands were donated to the sanctuaries (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 959 and 962), and in the higher elevations in geographic depressions. Given the climate and the droughts that were endemic in a number of regions, including the south, these lands required irrigation – “giving water” (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 942 and 943) being one of the main gifts bestowed by the kings – which normally consisted of dams on the rivers. We have no information at all on the level of rice production during the Indianized period and it is impossible to even arrive at an approximation, since to the extent the inscriptions mention levels of production at all, it is denominated in jak, a measure of volume that is unknown and for which the various hypotheses that have been proposed are unsatisfactory. Apart from rice, the ancient Cham writings make no mention of any other cultivated plants, referring only to “food”, “grains” and “means of sustenance”. However, thanks to Malay records, we know that the people cultivated – on lands that were not subject to flooding – sesame, peas, bananas, sugar cane, and coconut, from which, according to Chinese documents, they produced, among other things, “coconut wine”. In spite of the paucity of information, the report of the voyage of Bienheureux Odoric de Pordenone in Asia in the 14th century leads one to conclude that the people of Champa, at least during this period, had enough food to satisfy their needs. We are no better informed regarding the period following the 15th century, although the European merchants who visited Champa beginning in 1540 regularly make mention of the agricultural products in which they were interested. But these lists, obviously, do not include products in which foreigners had little interest, which were bulky and only marginally profitable – which describes the country’s most widely planted grain, rice. Even during this period the level of rice production is unknown, although it continued to be the country’s basic source of nutrition and was used in barter – the Chams of this era cultivated neither betel nut nor areca, although they used both, trading rice to obtain them from Vietnamese producers – and as a measure of loans and repayments. In addition to rice, the farmers grew sweet potatoes (Convolvulus Batatas Linné) which served as a supplement to rice when the harvests were poor, cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) which grew in the region later known as Bình-thuận, tobacco which was cultivated in the environs of Phan-rang, coconuts, and other plants of lesser importance. Alongside these cultivated crops, which were grown for consumption, the peasants harvested plants that grew in the wild: vegetables and wild fruits that they gathered to eat with their meals or as snacks. They also hunted small game – rabbits, wild chickens, pangolins, birds, peacocks (BEFEO XI, 1911, pp. 291 and 296) – on a daily basis on their way to and from the rice fields, which provided them with a source of meat which was otherwise rarely available from raised livestock due to frequent epidemics, particularly bovine fever, which periodically destroyed their few head of cattle, as well as to the frequency of animal sacrifices which resulted in a dearth of pigs and other backyard animals for consumption. Finally, the farmers fished in rivers and ponds, providing them and their families with an additional source of alimentation. The fishermen living along the some 800 kilometers of the country’s coast made their living in much the same way as the peasants, except that in their case their livelihood was based on the fish which they caught and ate and traded for rice with the farmers in the lowlands. Thus, fish together with rice formed the basis of the diet in the entire region, the

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coasts of which, especially in the south, were (as observed by O. de Pordenone in the 14th century) a plentiful source of seafood. In contrast to the subsistence economy of the farmers and coastal fishermen – that is, the quasi-totality of the population – the economy of the kings and their courts was based on profit from trade with merchant/navigators from India, China, Arabia, the Malay world and, beginning in the 16th century, Europeans. The latter came in order to acquire perfumed products, the hides of wild animals and precious metals, for which they had a ready market, and the absolute monarchs of Champa were in a position to satisfy these requirements in part, thanks to the monopoly they enjoyed for the harvesting, the hunting and the production of these products as well as the monopoly on their trade. In light of the discovery of shards of pottery of Chinese and Indian origin discovered at the excavation of Trà-kiệu, it would appear that Champa began to participate in trade soon after the beginning of our era. It also seems to have had, from very early on, a navy. From the first years of the 5th century, Chinese documents mention a naval fleet, but only in the context of pillaging expeditions along the coasts of present-day northern Vietnam; but this navy certainly also played a role in commerce, even if documentation from that time period allege that it was engaged in piracy on a grand scale. Although we know nothing of the size of this fleet, everything points to its aggrandizement from the early years of the 9th century when events taking place in western and central Asia disrupted transasiatic commerce along the land route known as the Silk Road, whereupon the merchants engaged in such commerce turned to the maritime route. The expansion of large-scale maritime commerce was of immediate benefit to Champa, given a geographic location which was ideal for layovers and a number of excellent ports: Turan (modern-day Đà-nẵng), Kam Ran (Cam-ranh), Sri Banoy (the port of Vijayapura, located in the bay of modern-day Qui-nhơn), Malithit (Phan-thiết), etc. The first monarchs to profit from this, as the archeological record shows, were those of Indrapura (Đồng-dương). Subsequently, Champa would become an important sea power – in 1177 it was its fleet that transported its army all the way to Angkor, and in 1203 over two hundred of its sailing vessels accompanied the flight of the king of Vijaya (Việt Sử Lược III) – and greatly expanded its commercial trade with China, India and the Middle East, where there was demand for Champa’s products. The fall of Vijaya in 1471 does not seem to have negatively affected its commerce for any extended period; the successor “indigenous” Champa soon found itself included in the economic sphere of Malacca and what remained of its maritime fleet plied the commercial trade routes which connected the trading ports and the godowns located along the coast of southern China. This continued until the middle of the 17th century when the Nguyễn lords of Phú-xuân (Huế) put an end to freedom of navigation to and from Champa and thus to free commerce with Champa, from which the monarchs and the high dignitaries derived an important part of their revenues. Among the principal items of the maritime trade from which the kings and the court derived their wealth, in first position – whether during the Indianized period or after the 15th century – was agarwood, the gahlau of the Cham, a fragrant wood which made Champa’s reputation from Japan to the Middle East. Botanists have yet to establish with certitude the type of tree which produces agarwood, but it has been continuously harvested and commercially traded since ancient times. And the agarwood of Champa has always been deemed to be the very finest: by the Indians at the beginning of our era, by the

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Chinese who already during the time Linyi required it as part of their tribute, by the great Arab writers such as al-Mas’ûdî in the 10th century and al-Idrisi in the 12th century, who called it çanfi (Arab: çanf = Champa), from the middle of the 16th century by Portuguese writers who called it calambac, and then in the following century by Dutch merchants. The trade in agarwood is mentioned in all of the accounts, as it was a source of great profits: in the 15th century, the Chinese offered to pay for the product with its weight in silver, and during the 17th century Europeans wrote that they could sell the product in Japan or the Middle East for fifteen times its cost in Champa. However, they make a distinction between agarwood (calambac) and eaglewood, the tree of origin of which is also little understood by botanists and which contemporary writers often confound with the former, while western merchants of the 17th century deemed it to be twenty times less valuable than calambac. If on the one hand we are well informed about the trade in agarwood, this is not the case with the other forest products mentioned in Chinese and Portuguese documents dating from the beginning of the 16th century, and it is difficult to determine if the trade in these products was subject to the king’s monopoly or to that of his entourage. Such is the case with, inter alia, the bark of wild cinnamon, which grew in the forests in the country’s center and which could be found in cargos destined for Japan up until the time the country closed its doors to trade in the 17th century; sandalwood; and cardamom, whose aromatic seeds harvested at higher altitudes was exported to China. Among other products sought by maritime traders were the skins, the tusks, the antlers and certain of the internal of wild animals such as gaurs, bantengs (Bos Sondaïcus Schleg. et Müll.), Eld’s deer and organs Aristotle’s deer, and rhinoceros (large numbers of which inhabited the high plateaus – Chinese documents mention that in 995 the king of Champa sent the emperor ten rhinocerous horns, in addition to three hundred elephant tusks) required for the preparation of certain medicines in the Chinese pharmacopoeia. Also worth mentioning are wildcats, tigers and panthers, who lived in the lowlands as well as in the peneplains, the hides of which were sent to regional warehouses for re-export to the West. Finally, a product of big game hunting, ivory, was derived from wild elephants of the highlands killed by proto-Indochinese people, who were required to send the kings of Champa a portion of the tusks as a fee for the right to hunt. During the 16th and 17th centuries these tusks were traded, similarly to furs, with China being the principal destination of the exports. The Cham monarchs also controlled the extraction of precious metals and, beginning at the end of the 15th century, established for themselves a monopoly on their trade. The most sought-after metal, gold, was extracted from the sands of river beds. Its production must have been substantial, given the number and size of the gold objects which the kings of Champa made for their gods on a regular basis. For example, in the year 1114 alone, King Harivarman V made an offering of nine gold objects weighing more than twenty kilograms to the god Srî Sânabhadresvara (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 951 and 952). The second precious metal, silver, which came from mines in the southern part of Indrapura, from Amarâvatî and from the northern part of Vijaya, was also found in abundance during the Indianized period, when the kings donated large amounts of the metal to the sanctuaries. Thus, in 1174 Jaya Indravarman V made a gift of nearly sixty kilograms of silver to the god Srî Sânbhadresvara for the ornamentation of a group of edifices dedicated to the god’s glory (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 971 and 974). After the fall of Vijaya, Champa found itself

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deprived of a number of its gold-bearing rivers and nearly all of its silver mines. It continued however to produce gold – no doubt in much smaller quantities – the trade in which (with seafaring merchants from Portugal, Holland and the Vietnamese nation) was subject to the royal monopoly. But we do not know if Champa continued to produce silver, since beginning in the early years of the 16th century no mention of the metal can be found in any document. Political organization By Prof. P-B. Lafont As with all of the other countries in the region, both during the Indianized period and the period that followed, Champa’s political system was that of absolute monarchy. But contrary to what one often reads, it was not a unitary kingdom but rather a federation of principalities or small kingdoms, the most prominent of which, from north to south, were Indrapura, Amâravatî, Vijaya, Kauthâra and Pânduranga, which were themselves divided into smaller circumscriptions governed by minor princelings. From the 11th to the 15th century the head of this federation, the existence of which was repeatedly contested by Pânduranga which on numerous occasions sought to establish its independence, was the king of Vijaya, who held the title “king of kings” (râjadhirâja) and who alone could undergo the abhisheka, a rite which, according to the inscriptions, could be performed only in the city of Vijaya, located near the modern city of Qui-nhơn. The Champa kings, who were all of the Ksatriya caste or a Brahmano-Ksatriya mixture, accorded particular importance to their deification as soon as they ascended the throne. Each of them presented himself to his people not only as their king, but also, and more importantly, as the emanation of a divine being (normally Shiva). And these divine rulers, who had statues made in their images which included the attributes of this god, and which were identified with a religious name as well as the king’s throne name (L. Finot, « Stèle de Çambhuvarman à Mĩ-sơn », in B.E.F.E.O. III, 1903, pp. 210, 211), saw themselves as symbols of power and glory, as shown in the lavish praise which they had engraved in each of their inscriptions. But this never prevented rival princes who contested the legitimacy of the sovereign, as occurred in the middle and end of the 12th century and in the middle of the 14th, or simply wanted to overthrow him and take his place, as was, inter alia, the case with Indravarman (V) and Maha Quí Đô, from rising against him. These internecine wars among princes, aggravated by the constant warfare between the country’s northern and southern regions, often led to internal instability. As a result, with force taking precedence over law (as shown throughout the history of Champa), the top priority of the kings, during unsettled times, was to establish their authority, defend the throne and deal with immediate issues rather than concern themselves with strengthening institutions which would last over time; and during calmer times to insure domestic order and peace in order to avoid challenges to their authority. To assist in governing the country and exercising their authority, the kings surrounding themselves with high-ranking dignitaries – other writers refer to them as ministers, but this word has a meaning which makes its use inappropriate in this context – which they selected, as well numerous wives and concubines from the most influential

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families of the kingdom, all belonging to the upper castes, chosen in order to secure their loyalty. These dignitaries had as their principal mission the collection of taxes and making preparations for warfare by the land and naval forces, but we do not know whether or not they were each assigned specific areas of responsibility. Collecting taxes, without which the royal treasury would be bare, was essential in order to control the high officials, to maintain the army, to undertake irrigation projects and to build the temples and religious foundations on which the monarch’s prestige depended. Raising revenues was the top priority for all of the kings. But revenue requirements often exceeded the amounts raised, due to the impoverishment of the population and the dispensation of religious foundations from all taxes, as shown in the steles of Đồng-dương translated by L. Finot (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 89 and 95) and E. Huber (BEFEO V, 1905, pp. 280 and 281). Thus, in order to replenish the royal treasury, the kings would on occasion send out pillaging expeditions to neighboring countries – in particular to the coasts of the neighboring Vietnamese – or engage in piracy on the high seas. In addition to the requirements of national defense, this explains why the Champa kings placed such importance on the country’s land and naval forces, whose manpower, materials and war animals are known to us through the bas-reliefs of Angkor Wat, the Bayon (Angkor) and Banteay Chmar (Cambodia) as well as in M. JacqHergoualc’h’s book L’armament et l’organisation de l’armée khmère aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris, PUF, 1979). After the collapse of Indianized Champa in 1471, the polity which was formed in the southern portion of ancient Champa and which took its name abandoned the political system modeled on that of India, which had subsisted at all times prior thereto, and set up a new system with new elements derived from the indigenous cultures of Kauthâra and Pânduranga and also from the Malay world, with which the country had been integrated from the end of the 15th century through maritime commercial ties with the ports of southern China (D. Lombard, Le carrefour javanais. Essai d'histoire globale: II. Les réseaux asiatiques, Paris, Editions de l'E.H.E.S.S., 1990). From that time forward, the kings of the new Champa ceased to be identified as reincarnations of gods and were considered simply as political leaders. But since at the same time there appeared a new political model wherein wealth became synonymous with power – not just in the exploitation of agricultural lands as during the Indianized period but also through long term trade relations, the kings of Champa henceforth made large-scale maritime trade a royal monopoly, and on multiple occasions acted as merchants themselves, as was the case of many of the Malay sultans. This new order explains why the sovereigns of Champa began to include people from the Malay peninsula in their entourages. According to indigenous texts as well as the tales of Western visitors, they acted as economic advisors, but they were also responsible for establishing and developing contacts with merchants and ship captains, supervising cargos and dealing with foreigners. It should not be forgotten that, effectively, that between the 16th and 18th centuries the Malay language was the lingua franca of southeast Asia, and all verbal and written communication with both natives and Europeans was conducted in this language (as an example, see the treaty of 1656 between Holland and the Khmers). This required the presence in each region of experts in spoken Malay, who were of necessity people who spoke Malay as their mother tongue, and in the Arabic script in which it was written. In addition to this essential Malay presence, the entourage of the kings of

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Champa was composed above all by Chams Ahiér, and beginning in the 17th century Chams Bani, as well as Montagnards, who appear to have been chosen from the Ede, Chru and Raglai tribes, i.e. among those who spoke an Austronesian language. According to the documentary evidence, a number of these officials had specific duties: religious, military, financial (supervising the collection of taxes), economic (regulating the mining of gold) and administrative. This situation lasted until the middle of the 17th century when, after having occupied Prangdarang, the Nguyễn lords of Phú-xuân (Huế) themselves chose the rulers and kept them under tight control, at the same time allowing them to exercise some of the attributes of sovereignty in order that they might accept their subordinate status. This changed with the Tây Sơn revolt (1771-1802), during which the Champa installed as rulers lost all authority and became virtual puppets of the Vietnamese. Finally, in 1832, the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mạng abolished the position and erased Champa from the map. Religious beliefs By Prof. P-B. Lafont From its beginnings until its defeat by the Vietnamese in 1471, Indianized Champa’s religious beliefs were those borrowed from India. However, contrary to what certain scholars have posited, these religious practices were essentially aristocratic in nature, and were adopted only by the upper classes of Cham society. The remainder of the population continued to practice their indigenous religions as they existed in pre-Indian times, although they were influenced by, and occasionally exercised an influence on, the religions that came from India. Through all twelve centuries of the existence of Indianized Champa, the upper castes practiced two separate religions, one official and one personal. The former finds its clearest expression in the Mĩ-sơn complex, which was the religious capital of the country for everything that had to do directly with the royalty. And during the Indianized period, it was Shivaism that formed the basis of the royal cults, with Shiva being throughout this time the one true national deity. The cult of Shiva, often in conjunction with that of its sakti, predominated over those of numerous other Hindu divinities who had their own local cults (L. Finot, “Inscription de Mi-sơn”, in BEFEO, Vol. II, 1902, p. 190). This is evidence by both inscriptions and sculpture. Throughout the Indianized period, Shiva was represented either in human form, with a third eye on the forehead, two or more arms with their individual attributes, and generally with the Brahman sacred cord; or, much more frequently, in the form of a linga – a kind of cylinder-shaped stone with a rounded tip, phallic in appearance, either plain or decorated, standing alone or attached to a basin for making ablutions – the cult of which was the cult of Shiva par excellence. Each of these linga had its own name, and some of them, found in the sanctuaries of the Mĩ-sơn complex, played a dynastic (and even, to use a modern term, a national) role: for example, the linga bearing the name of the god Bhadresvara, which symbolized the king and the country. The sakti of Shiva, which in Cham sculpture is represented in human form either alone or riding on the back of the bull Nandi, Shiva’s mount, was worshipped under various names, most notably in the southern part of the country the name Bhagavati where, after being

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associated up to the tenth century with the cult of the linga of Po Nagar in Nha Trang, the name of which was “Lord of the Goddess”, she became the sole major divinity of the south, Yang Pu Nagara. However, she was later absorbed into the cult of Bhadresvara, no doubt to foster the religious unification of the country’s northern and southern regions. Personal religions were also practiced by the kings, princes and high dignitaries. They were generally of lesser importance even though they are often mentioned in the inscriptions. One of the personal religions practiced was the worship of Vishnu, especially in the 7th and 8th centuries (E. Huber, « Etudes Indochinoises. IX Trois nouvelles inscriptions du roi Prakâçadharma du Campâ. 2.- L'inscription de Dương Mong », in B.E.F.E.O. 1911, p. 262) . Another was the veneration of his wife, Lakshmi, which shows up occasionally in evidence dating from the 8th and 14th centuries. There were other cults too, but of ancillary imporance, devoted to Brahma and to various deities to whom the homage recorded in the inscriptions are more literary than religious. Among the personal religions, Buddhism played an important role during certain eras, especially in the last quarter of the 9th century during the reign of Indravarman II, who favored Mahâyâna Buddhism and the Boddhisatva Avalokitesvara, who was the subject of a great deal of devotion, with a privileged position in his realm. It is to this king that is credited, among other things, the construction of a large Buddhist monastery, dedicated to Lakshmindralokesvara, at Đồng-dương, south of Trà-kiệu. The complex was studied, albeit incompletely, by H. Parmentier, who published a map of the sanctuary’s buildings as well as an inventory of the numerous monuments and statuary discovered within its large rectangular area in l'Inventaire archéologique de l'Indochine. II Monuments cams de l'Annam (Paris, Leroux, 1909-1918). Mahâyâna Buddhism enjoyed its privileged position until 914, at which time inscriptions of a Buddhist character disappeared. But this does not mean that the religion itself disappeared: Buddhist images in bronze and other materials that have been discovered dating from the 10th and 11th centuries are evidence of its continued existence. In addition to the ceremonies of which mention has been made, throughout the Indianized period the Champa sovereigns founded important religious establishments, notably those of Mĩ-sơn and Po Nagar of Nha Trang, in honor of the divinities whom they wished to glorify and thus from whom they solicited their blessings, and also, in honor of their ancestors who had been deified, in order to exalt their reigns. Like the kings, the princes and dignitaries of the realm also built religious edifices or installed lingas, which might be covered with gold leaf, in the temples, in order to glorify Shiva but also, for the princes, to show their noble descent and, for the dignitaries, as evidence of their importance and their power. This, more or less, is what we can divine from the inscriptions, which also mention that the kings and nobles who set up these foundations furnished them with land, farm animals, slaves, rice, silver, gold, etc. (E. Huber, BEFEO XI, 1911, pp. 19-20) in order that to maintain them, to such an extent that they were a drain on the nation’s wealth. Hinduism, in the form of the royal cult which it took in Champa, was a religion of the aristocracy. Thus, when the upper castes, those in whom power was reposited, disappeared following the attacks of the Đại Việt in the 15th century, the Hindu traditions which had served as the underpinnings of royal authority since the country’s foundation vanished as well. As a result, in the southern part of the country, which had not been

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annexed by the Vietnamese, a new Champa made its appearance, with a new religious framework which rapidly became that of the entire population of all classes of society. The first religious blossoming to appear after 1471 were the cults of invisible beings called the Yang. Belief in these spirits “which were present in all things and at all places” emanated from the lands of Kauthâra and Pânduranga (CM 35-14) and also involved “a belief that through appropriate acts one could call them forth, propitiate them, or make them go away”. These beliefs of the “ancient occupants…of Indochina” (P. Mus, « L'Inde vue de l'Est. Cultes indiens et indigènes au Champa », in B.E.F.E.O. XXXIII, 1933, pp. 367, 374) already existed prior to the arrival of religions from India and had been practiced on a non-official basis in the countryside throughout the Indianized period. When it was made official by the new political and religious authorities (CAM 104-4 and 5) the spirits seems to have evolved into a hierarchy of invisible beings (although it is also possible that such a hierarchy pre-existed) the most important of which were those believed to intervene directly and fundamentally in human lives. This explains the importance given to spirits associated with irrigation dams and the ceremonies in their honor. Indeed, in this semi-arid region they enjoyed, and continued to enjoy until quite recently, a place in the highest ranks of the Yang, since the people believed that it was thanks to them that humans received the water which provided the harvests and thus human existence. And as further evidence of the high station of these genies, in addition to the regular ceremonies involving the sacrifice of small farm animals and fowl which occur, among other times, in the first and seventh months of the Cham calendar, every year in Phan-rang (CM 22-4) a buffalo is sacrificed in thanksgiving to the spirits of the irrigation works and every seven years a large and solemn ceremony is held in their honor involving the sacrifice of, among other animals, a white buffalo (Cam 30-13). Side by side with these beliefs in supernatural beings, which now enjoyed official status, there sprung forth, apparently quite rapidly, new religious structures consisting of cults revolving around statues of divinities dating from the Indianized era which had escaped the destruction of statuary and inscriptions by the Vietnamese. But while prior to the 15th century each statue bore the name of the god or goddess which it purported to represent, this was no longer the case thereafter. The general population, which had not been involved in the religion practiced by the former aristocracy, honoring the trimûrti and other Hindu divinities, were ignorant of the names and characteristics of the gods represented by these statues. Nevertheless, they were aware that the statues were representations of divine beings, and they appropriated them and used them to represent the pantheon of divinities which they had created. They gave them names of either a genie considered locally as being particularly important, or of a person, often mythological but occasionally historical, of exceptional qualities and accomplishments advancing the human race of the highest order. Some writers of the 19th and 20th century believed that the cults surrounding these statues constituted a continuation in deformed version of the religious practices of the Indianized period, which led them to refer to the Chams who practiced it as “brahmanists”. But this is incorrect. It was not Shiva or other Hindu gods that the people were venerating (and continue to venerate), but rather, through the representations of these gods, divinities that were purely Cham. A striking example is the statue said to represent Po (Yang) Ina Nagar, of whom the Cham manuscripts state that she was born out of the clouds and the foam of the sea, was the creator of land (CAM 57-3), and who is the principal deity

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of the country as a whole; in fact, it is a statue of Bhagavati dating from the 10th or 11th centuries, a fact completely unknown to the Chams who pay homage to her. The same is true of the statue which people identify as that of the mythical king Po Klong Garai (CAM microfilm 15-5), who according to Cham literary sources is said to have taught humans how to dam the rivers (which explains why he is ranked among the most important divinities of the nation); unbeknownst to its worshippers, this statue is actually a mukhalinga. Then there is the statue of Shiva, which all the Chams believe to be a representation of king Po Rome (CAM 152-7), an historical figure said in the manuscripts to have united a divided Cham community, and the Shivaite idol and washing bowl which they believe to be the image of the deified king Po Nraup. We could add the nandin, ganesa, makara and all of the heads of Hindu divinities that have been unearthed, which the people have gathered up and to which they have given the names of local spirits, since they believe that they are representations of these spirits produced spontaneously by the land. Just as during the Indianized period the participation of Brahmans was required on numerous occasions, official ceremonies honoring the principal genies and the statues of the Cham divinities have always required, and still do require, the presence of Ahiér priests. These priests, the adhia and the basaih, are assisted during these ceremonies by the camnei (responsible for offerings), the kadhar (singers and musicians), and other auxiliaries, each of whom wears special vestments while performing these rituals (this is also true of the religious dignitaries of the Muslim Cham); reproductions of these articles of clothing can be seen in Busana Campa= Costumes of Campa (Kuala Lumpur, Muzium dan Antikuiti & EFEO, 1998). Towards the end of the 16th century, some of the practitioners of this newlyestablished religion became subject to the influence of Islam (P-Y. Manguin, “L’introduction de l’islam au Campâ” in BEFEO LXVI, 1979, pp. 255-287) through contact with Malay and Arab seamen who sailed along the coast of Champa. As a result of these contacts, an Islamized Cham community came into being in Pânduranga, and perhaps in Kauthâra as well. But one must question how deep the Islamization went. In fact, from the very first, the Cham seem to have assimilated and adapted the Koran, by far the greatest part of which is written in Cham and permeated with errors, to their indigenous cultural roots. The question is also posed by the fact that Allah appears most frequently not so much as the sole deity he is supposed to be but rather as the supreme deity of a rather wellpopulated pantheon. Moreover, the sole obligatory practice that these “Muslims” observe is the giving of alms (zakat), and this, only in a deformed sense. They neither observe the obligation of daily prayers nor do they fast during the month of Ramadan, which they leave to their imams and other officials of the religion; nor do they practice circumcision (which is replaced with a symbolic act), or make pilgrimage to Mecca, asserting that their presence there would result in its desacralization. Thus, the form of Islam practiced by these individuals, who refer to themselves as Bani (Semitic: beni = son of [the true faith]) but which notwithstanding the tenets of the religion continue to maintain a matrilineal and matrilocal social structure, conforms very little with orthodox doctrine. They even require, as a condition to conversion, that the candidate’s mother be a Moslem; otherwise, permission to convert will be refused (CAM microfilm 6-2). Finally, they maintain a close relationship with the Cham Ahiér – who themselves have absorbed Po Uvalvah (Allah) into the field of local divinities – and participate with them in all of the main religious

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ceremonies of the Cham ethnic group. As an example, during the rija (CM 27-30) and the ceremonies honoring the spirits of the irrigation dams, their gru, imam, acar and katib (scribe, preacher) celebrate – except for participation in some of the prayers – the same rites honoring the Cham divinities at the same time and place as the Ahiér priests. In contract to the Cham Bani of central Vietnam, the Cham who emigrated to and now live in Cambodia have become, with the exception of a few scattered villages, orthodox Moslems. They practice the five pillars of Islam and observe the obligations and interdictions of Sunni tradition. This is attributable to the very close relationship with the Malay community in Cambodia, which since the 16th century has greatly contributed to the religious education of the Cham and encouraged them to submit to the teachings of the ulamas of Kelantan and Terengganu (Malaysia) through which they could restore the proper beliefs and practices. This is why the Cambodian Cham, for the past fifteen years, have been subject to the propaganda and pressures of various Islamist reformist movements operating in Southeast Asia. In the highlands of Champa, a number of towers/sanctuaries and statues of Hindu divinities, all dating from the Indianized period, have been found, which bear witness to the existence of local religious practices identical to those of the coastal regions. But inasmuch as the inscription of Kon Klor near Công-tum (Kontum) is that of a person of whom we know only the name (Mahîndravarman), and moreover because we are ignorant of the origins of the inscriptions found in the valley of the Ba river (in the modern-day province of Gia-lai), we do not know if their authors were Chamized Montagnards or people from the coast who had settled in the highlands. In contrast, we are better informed regarding the religious practices of the Montagnards in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. For them, the entire universe was guided by invisible beings, genies and spirits of deceased ancestors, whom they sought to propitiate or neutralize (see, inter alia, J. Boulbet, Pays des Maa. Domaine des génies. Nggar Maa. Nggar Yang, Paris, Publications de l'E.F.E.O., vol. LXII, 1967). They believed that the best way to accomplish this was through religious ceremonies based on sacrifice and the recitation of prayers by one of the participants – which is why the number of sacrifices was so prolific. This continued until the fourth quarter of the 20th century, when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam took a position against these practices as a part of its fight against superstition. Social organization By Prof. P-B. Lafont The social organization of the inhabitants of Champa during the era of Indianization differed from that which existed after the 15th century. Furthermore, during both of these eras, that of the lowlands differed from that of the highlands. During the period of Indianization the vast majority of the lowlands population consisted of ethnic Cham, only a few of whom had Indian blood resulting from intermarriage. It is difficult to determine whether this society was patrilineal or matrilineal. Indeed, on a bilingual stele found at Mĩ-sơn the Sanskrit part emphasizes the patrilineal descent of the king Harivarman (IV) while the Cham part puts the accent on the female line (L. Finot, “Les inscriptions de Mĩ-sơn XII” in BEFEO, 1904, pp. 904, 934-935, 937-938.).

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Is this contradiction due to a desire to reflect, in the Sanskrit, fidelity to Indian practice, where royal descent is patrilineal, while the Cham version mirrors the social organization which still exists among the Cham in central Vietnam as of the beginning of the 21st century? At our current state of knowledge, we have nothing that would permit us to answer this question. The Chams were integrated into a system of four hereditary castes, which are identified in a tombstone from Mĩ-sơn written in old Cham (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 948 and 950). A minority constituted the upper castes. First came the Brahmins, of which the inscription states: “There is no greater sin than the murder of a Brahmin.” (BEFEO IV, 1904, p. 925.) Next were the Ksatriya, who often formed alliances with the Brahmins, so much so that a mixed Brahmin-Ksatriya caste was formed (BEFEO IV, 1904, pp. 963-964) that some have characterized as a religious and warrior caste. These upper castes formed the ruling class as well as the political and religious dignitaries of the kingdom and the principalities. The inscriptions also mention the existence of vamsa, that is, of lineages – and not clans, as has often been erroneously stated – for the princely families who produced the occupants of the supreme throne (râjadhirâja). The best known are the Nârikelavamsa (Coconut), the Kramukavamsa (Areca) and the Brsuvamsa lineages. But since the inscriptions make no mention of any lineages for other social groups, we do not know if the latter also had clearly delineated family lines or, if so, if these had their own designations. The third caste was the Vaisya, which included farmers, who formed the vast majority of the population of the coastal region; lumbermen who lived at the base of the Annamite Cordillera, merchants; and all of those involved in maritime activities: fishing along the coast and trading with southern China, as well as piracy, which all seemed to have practiced. The rest of the population belonged to the fourth caste, the Sudra, of which we know very little inasmuch as the inscriptions deal mostly with the two upper castes. According to the inscriptions and manuscripts at our disposal, the Chams were often at odds with one another and there was rarely true unity among those living in the southern portion of the country –particularly in Pânduranga – and those inhabiting the northern regions, as shown in the inscription on the Po Klong Garai temple which describes the former as being “in constant revolt against the sovereigns who reigned over the Kingdom of Champa” (L. Finot, “Pânduranga”, in BEFEO III, 1903, pp. 643 and 645). Along with the Cham, the inscriptions make mention of the existence of hulun, a term customarily translated as “slave” while it is better translated as “non-free”. The “Pilier de Lomngö” (L. Finot, BEFEO IV, 1904, p. 634) includes among them the “Chinese”, the “Siamese” the “Pukâm” (Pagan). Finally, “Chamized” Montagnards lived in the coastal regions, but we know nothing about their status or their occupations. We know nothing about the lives of the people in the highlands, the Montagnards. We know that they were divided into tribes. The inscriptions give the names of some of them who spoke languages in the Austronesian family and others whose languages were part of the Austroasiatic family; the societies of the former having a matrilineal structure and, it would appear, those of the latter being patrilineal. Certain of these tribes – those whose languages were in the Chamic family – had close relationships with the Cham. Proof of this can be found in the active participation, during the period 1283-1285, of certain of these tribes in the war waged by the King of Champa – who had taken refuge with them following the seizure of the capital Vijaya – against the Mongols, who had invaded the coastal areas of the country. As for the other tribes, the writings call them

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barbarians (Mleccha; Mán in Sino-Vietnamese). But some are described as having submitted to the authority of Champa – for which there is also evidence in the oral traditions still widely extant in the middle of the 20th century of certain tribes speaking Austroasiatic languages – while others as said to not have submitted. We know almost nothing else about the Montagnards, save for the fact that the religious foundations established at Yang Prong in Darlac (Đắc-lắc) in the middle of the 20th century show that a significant number of Randaiy (Rhades) were integrated into the society of Champa – as were no doubt other ethnic groups, particularly during the struggle against the Mongols. Following the collapse of Indianized Champa, i.e. during the period from the end of the 15th century to the beginning of the 19th century, the written record provides greater detail. We learn that for many centuries, perhaps even prior to the 16th century, the society of all of the Cham living in Central Vietnam was organized under matrilineal lines; this was of capital importance in determining an individual’s place in the society. This system had another aspect, which subsisted up until the victory of the Vietnamese revolutionaries in 1975: the rule of matrilocal residence, which meant that males were not part of the economic unit into which they were born (P-B., Lafont, « Contribution à l'étude des structures sociales des chàm du Viet Nam », in B.E.F.E.O. LII-1, 1964, pp. 157-171). As for the Chams of Cambodia, the Islamization of this group following their immigration into the country resulted in the evolution of their social structure: the abandonment of matrilineal succession in favor of the patrilineal, and the accordance of primacy to male members of society, in conformity with Koranic prescriptions. Following the disappearance of castes, which occurred the same time as the collapse of Indianized Champa, there evolved in the coastal areas two classes of society. The first is what were called “thar patao bamao mâh”, which for a lack of a better term we call the aristocracy, which included the king and his family, the families of princes, and those of other dignitaries of high rank. The second was comprised of the masses, “bal li-ua hua hawei”, composed of free men and women – farmers, paid workers, merchants and seafarers – and the non-free, in servitude for debts both voluntary and involuntary. These were halun (hulun) who could be sold by their “owners”, but who could also buy their freedom (Inventaire des archives du Pæ◊∂uraßga du Fonds de la Société Asiatique de Paris. Pièces en caractères chinois, Paris, Centre d'Histoire et Civilisations de la Péninsule Indochinoise, 1984, pp. 34, 48). The class to which one belongs, which is determined at birth – by the class to which the mother belongs – has, up to this day, played a not insignificant role in the social structure of those Chams who until very recently were referred to as “brahmanist” (Cham Jat or Ahiér). Indeed, among the latter marriages between people of the same class have always been preferred, while marriages between girls of the lower class and boys of the aristocratic class are prohibited (pakap), since an individual’s forebears are determined by his or her matrilineal descent. Recent scholarship has shown that, since the 15th century, the proto-Indochinese have at all times been divided into tribes, the names of which are well known (F. M. Lebar, G. C. Hickey, J. K. Musgrave, Ethnic Groups of Mainland Southeast Asia, New Haven, H.R.A.F. Press, 1964, pp. 135-158, 249-255), and which are unrelated to one another. It has also shown that until the 21st century each of these tribes was nothing more than a collection of villages, sometimes allied and sometimes enemies, but most often without any contact with one another, and that tribal unity never existed. At most there were ties

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between individual villages, often limited to intermarriages and within very small geographical areas. These ethnic groups since the 16th century were organized either along matrilineal (for those which spoke Austronesian languages – Jarai, Edu, Chru, Raglai and Hroy) or patrilineal lines. Certain of them had, and still have, family groups which each constitute exogamous clans, each member of which bears a clan name that is passed down on the mother’s side for those ethnic groups organized matrilineally and on the father’s side for those organized along patrilineal lines. Being a member of a given clan, which indicates that all clan members share a common ancestor, means among other things that marriage between two individuals of the same clan is forbidden, while marriage outside the clan is permitted. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, the Montagnards, and especially those who spoke Austronesian languages and whose societies are organization along matrilineal lines, had particularly close relations with the Cham and even intermarried with the Cham. Evidence for this can be found in Cham manuscripts, which mention among other things that one of the wives of the king Po Rome (1627-1651) was of Rhade origin (CM 41-4; CAM microfilm 1-3), and that after the fall of Thuận Thành-Prangdarang, the leaders of the anti-Vietnamese revolt which took place chose an ethnic Raglai (CM 24-5; CM 32-6), the husband of a Cham woman (Đại Nam Thực Lục Chính Biên XVI, translation in quốc-ngữ, Hanoi, 1962, p. 197) as the king of the new Prangdarang which they hoped to establish. Cham manuscripts dating from the 17th and 18th centuries also show that a large number of senior dignitaries were of Montagnard origin, which demonstrates that during this period there was a mixing of the populations and that the Cham and proto-Indochinese – or at least some of the latter – lived in perfect harmony and enjoyed the same degree of social and political rights. This symbiotic relationship existed until 1835 when Emperor Minh Mang prohibited all interaction between the peoples of the lowlands and those residing in the mountains, which eventually resulted in a distancing of the groups one from the other. Indianization By Prof. P-B. Lafont After a remarkable Neolithic era, in the proto-historical period bronze from China, and various influences from Đồng-sơn culture, made their appearance in the central and southern portions of the coastal regions of modern day Central Vietnam. During the same period, there arose in this area civilizations of great vitality which, as the beginning of the first century approached, became the receptacle of new influences, this time coming from India. No contemporary documents exist relating to the Indianization of the land which would become Champa. We know only that at the beginning of the Christian era, an everincreasing number of Indian sailors and merchants made their way to the southeast and central areas of the Indochinese peninsula in search of gold. There, with the approval of the local residents, they established trading houses which, over the passage of time and accompanied by the arrival of Brahmins and Ksatriya, became centers for the diffusion of Indian culture to the indigenous people (G. Cœdès, Les Etats hindouisés d'Indochine et d'Indonésie, Paris, De Boccard, 1964, pp. 44-72). We do not know at what point these influences became dominant--it is believed that this happened around the 4th century CE –

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nor do we know if they came exclusively by sea or also, in the south (Funan, Malay peninsula), by land. Contrary to what is often thought, however, this process of Indianization, wherein its protagonists openly penetrated already established civilizations and set up new political entities, did not affect the entirely of the indigenous population. It really left its mark only on those elements of the population in direct contact with the Indian immigrants – and in particular with the upper castes – who had been subject to their influence and adopted their way of life. As a result, the evidence leads us to believe – and this would be confirmed in the 15th century – that only a minority of the Cham people were truly Indianized. As for the majority, it continued to reflect the characteristics – no doubt with a light Indian coating – of a civilization, itself relatively advanced, that had existed prior to the arrival of these foreigners. We should also look at this process of Indianization as primarily involving an elite, which used it to impose its authority on the rest of the society from which it had itself sprung. It was due to Indianization that the Cham elite was able to create a written form of the language, based on the devanâgarî alphabet. Indianization also brought Sanskrit, the language of civilization, to Champa, which it used up to 1253 CE. And it brought its great religious belief systems – Sivaism and Buddhism – and a social organization, based on the division of the population into four hereditary castes (L. Finot, “Les inscriptions de Mĩsơn XVI” in BEFEO, Vol. IV, 1904, p. 950), that subsisted until the 15th century. Indianization also introduced Champa to India’s religious and technical writings and to its epic poems, and provided it with its monarchic system of governance which served as a model for Indianized Champa (and which was not totally abandoned even when superseded by “indigenous” Champa after the 15th century). As far as the highlands are concerned, the written records indicate that they were not subject to Indian influences during the first centuries of the Christian era and that their inhabitants remained in a backward stage of civilization throughout this period. It was only after the “Randaiy [Rhade], Mada, Mleccha [as well as the other barbarians]” had been conquered by the Cham, as referenced in the inscription of Batau Tablah from the 12th century, that those proto-Indochinese tribes speaking Austronesian languages appear to have subjected to the technical and cultural influences from the Cham which allowed them to pass from the category to Mleccha to that of Kirâta (Montagnards). No doubt certain among them developed the close and frequent contacts with the Cham of which one finds traces in the inscriptions – which, however, do not indicate if they were assimilated to the point of being integrated into one of the castes into which Indianized Champa was divided. Neither is there any such evidence in any of the religious monuments found in the high plateaus. Demography By Prof. P-B. Lafont We have seen that the coastal strip of Champa, where the ethnic Cham resided, consisted of very little territory, the soils of which were not particularly suitable for farming. As a result, agricultural production was low, which in turn prevented population growth. In order for the population to increase, it would have been necessary to expand cultivation to

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new regions. This, however, never happened – due, as we have already seen, to religious reasons. The religious beliefs of the Cham forbade them from living anywhere beyond the limits of their villages (such limits being a function of the territory in which each village’s protective spirits resided), since had they done so they would lose the protection of these divinities. This meant that the borders of the villages – and by extension the borders of the kingdom itself – were immutable. These facts explain why the population numbers barely changed throughout the period during which the Cham occupied the coastal area. We have also seen that, in contrast to the lowlands, the surface area of the high plateaus was quite large. However, the proto-Indochinese groups that populated these regions did not know how, and above all could not, in these times, exploit these territories by any other than the slash-and-burn method, which required allowing the land to lay fallow for some fifteen to twenty years after each period of cultivation, generally three years, in order to allow the soil to regenerate itself. (P-B. Lafont, « L'agriculture sur brûlis chez les proto-indochinois des hauts plateaux du centre Vietnam », in Les Cahiers d'OutreMer. Revue de Géographie, Tome XX, 1967, pp. 37-50). Thus for the Montagnards it was impossible to increase the area of land devoted to cultivation, and consequently impossible to increase their numbers. Although all the evidence available indicates that the population of Champa remained constant up until the end of the era of Indianization (we have no information regarding the period from the 16th and 19th centuries), there is nothing in the record that indicates what, at any given time, what the population was. The inscriptions only deal incidentally with matters that do not involve religion; and when, exceptionally, a number is given, it is that of the size of a vanquished enemy army (L. Finot, “Les inscriptions de Mĩsơn XXI A et B“, in BEFEO, Vol. IV, 1904, p. 965), which is invariably exaggerated in order to magnify the achievement of the victor. Also, the numbers which appear in Vietnamese annals also deal with the size of enemy armies and tend to use the number 100,000, which seems excessive for the times. As regards the two numbers that purportedly disclose the population of the capital city Vijaya in the 15th century, they cannot be considered informative, inasmuch as one of them speaks of 2,500 families – which would correspond to 10,000 individuals – and the other of a population of 70,000. It is also the case that as of the end of the 20th century, the exact number of Cham and proto-Indochinese people is not known, the numbers provided by scholars and by official or semi-official sources being only approximations – sometimes manipulated to suit the agenda of the reporter. Thus, the numbers provided by writers for the Cham population in Vietnam varies from 95,000 (Po Dharma, Paris, 1997) to 76,000 (Cao Xuân Phổ, Hanoi, 1988), while to this writer the number 60,000 appears to be closer to reality. The population numbers of the Chams of Cambodia, descendants of residents of the coastal areas of Vietnam who, beginning with the end of the 15th century, fled from Vietnamese attacks in order to avoid death or reduction into slavery, are also problematic. In fact, Western scholars have systematically confounded the Chams with the Malays of Cambodia, as the two ethnic groups are physically quite similar to one another, both practice the same orthodox Islam, and have intermarried over a long period of time. Thus, contrary to what appears in their publications, they have never given an exact or even estimated number for these people separately, but rather a single number for the two combined, whom they refer to as either Malays or Cham depending on when they were producing their work. This led

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to numbers that bear no relation to reality. The most reliable information comes from the census taken in Cambodia in 1998, which puts at 250,000 the number of “Khmer Islam”, i.e. the Malays and the Moslem Cham taken together. Since, contrary to what one often reads, the number of Cham is lower than the number of Malays, we can estimate the number of Cham – that is, people who identify themselves as Cham and speak Cham to a greater or lesser extent – at around 100,000. Since the end of the second Indochinese War, one hears reference to a Cham diaspora numbering approximately 20,000, living mostly in Malaysia and secondarily in the extreme west of the United States and in France. However, the quasitotality of this number is accounted for by Khmer Islam people who fled Cambodia following the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge in 1975. When asked, the great majority of these people identify themselves as being of Malay and not Cham origin; as for the remainder, they tend to identify themselves as Muslims rather than as Cham. Only a miniscule fraction of the Cham diaspora comes from central Vietnam, consisting of individuals who left Vietnam for fear of reprisals after the victory of the communists, against whom they fought. The population numbers of the proto-Indochinese groups who speak Austronesian languages have never been determined, notwithstanding the fact that they are provided in a publication dated 1991 with the title Census. This document states the number of Rhade (Ede) to be 194,000 (although there were no more than 120,000 at a maximum), of the Raglai at 71,696 (sic) (while the true number is around 50,000), and of the Chru at 10,746 (sic). The Jarai population appears to be around 150,000.

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