Champa was a collection of independent Cham polities that extended across the coast of what is present-day central and southern Vietnam from approximately 2nd century AD until 1832. According to the earliest historical references found in the ancient sources, the first Cham polities were established around the 2nd to 3rd centuries AD, in the wake of Khu Liên's rebellion against the rule of the Eastern Han dynasty, and lasted until when the final remaining principality of Champa was annexed by emperor Minh Mạng of the Nguyễn dynasty as a part of the expansionist Nam tiến policy.
Early Champa evolved from the seafaring Austronesian Chamic Sa Huỳnh culture off the coast of modern-day Vietnam. It was preceded in the region by a kingdom called Lâm Ấp (Vietnamese), or Linyi (, Middle Chinese (ZS): *liɪm ʔˠiɪp̚), that was in existence since 192 AD; although the historical relationship between Linyi and Champa is not clear. Scholarly consensus has shifted several times as to what degree Champa functioned as a unified polity. Originally being viewed as a unified kingdom throughout most of its history, later authors suggested that Champa was better considered to be a federation of independent states. A number of modern scholars have suggested that Champa did form a unified kingdom in some periods but was disunited in others.
Hinduism, adopted through conflicts and conquest of territory from neighboring Funan in the 4th century AD, shaped the art and culture of the Cham Kingdom for centuries, as exemplified by the many Cham Hindu statues and red brick temples that dotted the landscape in Cham lands. In Champa, historians have also found the Đông Yên Châu inscription, the oldest known native Southeast Asian literature written in a native Southeast Asian language dating to around 350 AD, predating first Khmer, Mon, Malay texts by centuries.
Champa reached its apogee in the 9th and 10th centuries CE. The peoples of Champa maintained a system of lucrative trade networks across the region, connecting the Indian Ocean and Eastern Asia, until the 17th century. Thereafter, it began a gradual decline under pressure from Đại Việt, the Vietnamese polity centered in the region of modern Hanoi. In 1832, the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mạng annexed the remaining Cham territories. Mỹ Sơn, a former religious center, and Hội An, one of Champa's main port cities, are now World Heritage Sites.
Although the kingdom had a multi-ethnic population, the majority consisted of Austronesian Chamic-speaking peoples; Chamic languages are a subfamily of Malayo-Polynesian closely related to the Malayic and Bali–Sasak languages that is spoken throughout maritime Southeast Asia. The people who used to inhabit the region are the present-day Chamic-speaking Cham, Rade and Jarai peoples in South and Central Vietnam and Cambodia; the Acehnese from Northern Sumatra, Indonesia, along with elements of Austroasiatic Bahnaric and Katuic-speaking peoples in Central Vietnam.
Today, many Cham people adhere to Islam, a conversion which began in the 10th century, with the ruling dynasty having fully adopted the faith by the 17th century; they are called the Bani (Ni tục, from Arabic: Bani). There are, however, the Bacam (Bacham, Chiêm tục) who still retain and preserve some syncretic Hindu rituals. The Bacam are one of the few surviving non-Indic indigenous Hindu peoples in the world, with a culture dating back thousands of years. The other being the Balinese Hindus and Tengger Hindus in Indonesia.
Etymology The kingdom was known variously as Nagaracampa, Champa (चम्पा, ꨌꩌꨛꨩ) in Sanskrit as well as in modern Cham, and Châmpa () in the Khmer inscriptions, Chiêm Thành in Vietnamese, Campa in Malay, Zhànchéng (占城) in Chinese records, and aṣ-Ṣanf (صَنْف) in Arabic.
The name Champa derived from the Sanskrit word (; ), which refers to Magnolia champaca, a species of flowering tree known for its fragrant flowers. Rolf Stein proposed that Champa might have been inspired when Austronesian sailors originating from Central Vietnam arrived in present-day Eastern India around the area of Champapuri (the capital of the then Anga Mahajanapada; presently in Bhagalpur district, Bihar), an ancient sacred city in Buddhism, for trade, then adopted the name for their people back in their homeland. While Louis Finot argued that the name Champa was brought by Indians to Central Vietnam.
Other academics however dispute the Indic origin explanation, which was conceived by Louis Finot, a colonial-era board director of the École française d'Extrême-Orient. In his 2005 Champa revised, Michael Vickery challenges Finot's idea. He argues that the Cham people always refer themselves as Čaṃ rather than Champa (-pa–abbreviation of -pēśvara, though see Īśvara for more; though Champa was also known as Campādēśa and Campānagara as well, though do also see the wikilinked suffixes). Most indigenous Austronesian ethnic groups in Central Vietnam such as the Rade, Jarai, Churu, Raglai peoples call the Cham by similar lexemes which likely derived from Čaṃ. Vietnamese historical accounts also have the Cham named as Chiêm. Most importantly, the official designation of Champa in Chinese historical texts was Zhànchéng – meaning "the city of the Cham," "why not city of the Champa?," Vickery doubts.
Historiography
Sources The historiography of Champa relies upon four types of sources:Vickery, "Champa Revised", pp. 4 ff. Physical remains, including ruins as well as stone sculptures; Inscriptions in Cham, Sanskrit, and Arabic (Kufic) on steles and other stone surfaces; Chinese and Vietnamese annals, diplomatic reports, and other literature such as those provided by Jia Dan; Historiography of modern Cham people.
Approximately four hundred Champa inscriptions have been found. Around 250 of them were deciphered and studied throughout the last century. Many Cham inscriptions were destroyed by American bombing during the Vietnam War. Currently, the Project Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā launched by French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) partnering with the Institute for Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) of New York University is tasked for cataloging, sustaining and preserving ancient Cham inscriptions into an online index library and publications of scholarship's epigraphical studies into English, French, and Vietnamese.
The Cham have their written records in form of paper book, known as the Sakkarai dak rai patao, was a 5227-pages collection of Cham veritable records, documenting a history range from early legendary kings of 11th–13th centuries to the deposition of Po Thak The, the last king of Panduranga in 1832, reckoning in total 39 rulers of Panduranga, the tales of spread of Islam to Champa in 1000, to Po Thak The. The annals were written in Akhar Thrah (traditional) Cham script with collection of Cham and Vietnamese seals imprinted by Vietnamese rulers. However, it had been dismissed for a long time by scholars until Po Dharma. Cham literature also have been greatly preserved in approximately more than 3,000 Cham manuscripts and printed books dating from the 16th to 20th centuries. The Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL) at Northern Illinois University currently contains an extensive collection of 977 digitized Cham manuscripts, totaling more than 57,800 pages of multigenre content.
Overarching theories
Modern scholarship has been guided by two competing theories in the historiography of Champa. Scholars agree that historically Champa was divided into several regions or principalities spread out from south to north along the coast of modern Vietnam and united by a common language, culture, and heritage. It is acknowledged that the historical record is not equally rich for each of the regions in every historical period. For example, in the 10th century AD, the record is richest for Indrapura; in the 12th century, it is richest for Vijaya; following the 15th century, it is richest for Panduranga. Some scholars have taken these shifts in the historical record to reflect the movement of the Cham capital from one location to another. According to such scholars, if the 10th-century record is richest for Indrapura, it is so because at that time Indrapura was the capital of Champa. Other scholars have disputed this contention, holding that Champa was never a united country, and arguing that the presence of a particularly rich historical record for a given region in a given period is no basis for claiming that the region functioned as the capital of a united Champa during that period.Maspero, Le Royaume de Champa, represented the thesis that Champa was politically unified. Vickery, "Champa Revised", challenges that thesis.Early colonial era scholars and later DRV and SRV authors treated Champa as a single, unified political body. New academic works on Cham studies begun in late 1980s revised this notion. The majority of scholarship now at least agree that Champa was a series of dynamic coexisting, overlapping polyethnic kingdoms and small principalities.Previous histories of Champa such as Étienne Aymonier's 1889 Tschampa and Georges Maspero's 1910 The Kingdom of Champa had provided the ground academic understanding of Champa for almost a century. Maspero represented Champa as a single, unified kingdom, with the Cham explicitly made up nearly all of its demographics. He also presented a list of 14 presumably Cham dynasties dating back to the 2nd century.
History
Sources of foreign cultural influence