History
Champa
ចំប៉ា
Former kingdom of the Cham on the coast of central Vietnam, neighbor and rival of the Khmer kingdom
Champa (ចំប៉ា) was a kingdom of the Cham (ចាម) people on the coast of what is now central Vietnam.[1][2] For centuries it was the eastern neighbor and frequent rival of the Khmer Empire, and it is the homeland from which the Cham people of Cambodia descend.[3][1]
Land and people
The Cham speak an Austronesian language whose closest relatives are the languages of Borneo. Charles Higham wrote that their ancestors probably settled the coast during the first millennium BC.[4] Champa's lands were a chain of narrow coastal plains between the mountains and the sea, with their centers at the mouths of rivers. Among its regions were Panduranga in the south, Vijaya and Amaravati.[4][5] Its rulers took up Hindu gods and the Sanskrit language, much as the Khmer kings did,[4] and they left inscriptions in Sanskrit and Old Cham.[3] The chief temple of the kings stood at Mỹ Sơn, dedicated to the god Srisanabhadresvara.[3]
The kingdom's beginnings are dated differently. R. C. Majumdar traced it to a revolt in about 192 against Chinese rule, in the district the Chinese called Lin-yi, a name their records later gave to Champa.[6] Michael Vickery held that Linyi was a separate state, and that an expanding Champa took over part of its territory and its Chinese name, possibly only around the early seventh century.[3]
Champa may never have been a single kingdom. Vickery argued that its regions were often separate states that at times were rivals.[3]
Wars with the Khmer
Vickery wrote that the Cham and the Khmer had been in close touch since the earliest records, and that each people knew the routes by land and by water into the other's country.[3] In the reign of the Cham king Harivarman, who was on the throne in 803, a general named Par led a campaign against the Khmer and plundered their towns.[6]
The Khmer king Rajendravarman II, who came to the throne in 944, made war on Champa between 944 and 947. His troops sacked the Po Nagar temple and carried off its golden image of the goddess. The Cham king Indravarman drove them back, and in 965 he set up a stone image in place of the one that had been taken.[6][7]
An inscription at Mỹ Sơn dated 1056 records that a Cham commander, the Yuvaraja Mahasenapati, took the Khmer city of Sambhupura (សម្ភុបុរៈ), destroyed its shrines and gave its Khmer captives to the temples of Mỹ Sơn.[6][3] Chun Chanboth's history records a Cham attack in 1074, when Prince Pang, a brother of the Cham king, led an army up the Mekong (មេគង្គ) to Sambhupura, at present-day Sambor (សម្បូរ). His troops looted the old city, burned its shrines and led many Khmer away as captives. Two years later, Khmer and Cham armies joined a campaign of Song China against Đại Việt, the Vietnamese kingdom, and attacked the region of Nghe An. They withdrew when China did.[2]
Suryavarman II (សូរ្យវរ្ម័នទី២)
Suryavarman II (សូរ្យវរ្ម័នទី២) took the Khmer throne in 1112[6] or 1113.[8][9] He first made Champa his ally against Đại Việt, then turned on it.[7] Majumdar wrote that a joint campaign failed in 1128 because the Cham army arrived too late, and that the Cham king Jaya Indravarman made his own peace with Đại Việt in 1136. In 1145 the Khmer invaded Champa and took Vijaya, and Jaya Indravarman was not heard of again.[6][8] Vickery noted that no Khmer inscription tells of these wars. They are known from Cham inscriptions and Vietnamese histories, and naming Suryavarman as the king behind the attacks of the 1140s is an assumption.[3]
Champa recovered under Jaya Harivarman. He beat two Khmer armies, in 1147 and 1148 by Majumdar's reading[6] or both in 1148 by Vickery's.[3] In 1149 he overcame Harideva, a brother-in-law of the Khmer king, whom the Khmer had made king at Vijaya.[6][3]
The attack on Angkor
In the troubled years after Suryavarman II, Champa struck at the Khmer capital. Briggs and Glaize date the Cham capture and sack of Angkor (អង្គរ) to 1177.[9][7] Majumdar, following Chinese records, wrote that the Cham king Jaya Indravarman fought the Khmer by land from 1170 with no clear result. In 1177 he sent a fleet up the Mekong that plundered the capital and sailed home with great booty.[6] Nhim Sotheavin wrote that the Cham burned the capital and held Angkor for four years, from 1177 to 1181,[8] and Glaize gave the same years for a Cham occupation.[7]
Vickery questioned the date. He pointed out that no Cham inscription mentions an invasion in 1177 or any Cham occupation of Angkor, and that the year and the route by river come from Chinese accounts he did not trust.[3] An inscription of Jayavarman VII (ជ័យវរ្ម័នទី៧) at the Phimeanakas tells of the Cham king Jaya Indravarman bringing his army in carts to fight the Khmer, which Vickery read as an attack by land. That invasion overthrew Tribhuvanadityavarman, who had taken the Khmer throne.[3]
Reliefs on the Bayon show a naval battle of the late 12th century. Glaize identified the Khmer by their short hair and the Cham by a headdress shaped like an upturned lotus flower.[7] The reliefs of the Bayon and of Banteay Chhmar show the king at war with the Cham,[4] though Vickery noted that no inscription names the two sides, which are told apart only by their headgear.[3]
Jayavarman VII (ជ័យវរ្ម័នទី៧)
Before he became king, Jayavarman VII had spent time in Vijaya, Vickery wrote, on the evidence of the Phimeanakas inscription.[3] He drove out the Cham and took the throne in 1181.[9][7]
A Cham prince named Vidyanandana came to the Khmer court in 1182. Jayavarman VII made him crown prince after he put down a revolt in the town of Malyang. In 1190 the king sent him at the head of a Khmer army against Vijaya, where he captured the Cham king Jaya Indravarman and sent him to Cambodia.[6][9] Jayavarman then divided Champa in two. His brother-in-law, Prince In, ruled the north from Vijaya, and Vidyanandana ruled the south from Rajapura.[6]
The division did not last. A local chief drove Prince In out of Vijaya. Vidyanandana took Vijaya in 1192 and ruled all of Champa as King Suryavarman. Majumdar wrote that he then turned against the Khmer and beat the armies Jayavarman sent against him in 1193 and 1194.[6] Nhim Sotheavin, by contrast, wrote that a Khmer army defeated Suryavarman in 1193.[8] In 1203 a Khmer army led by the Yuvaraja Dhanapatigrama, another Cham prince from the Khmer court, defeated Suryavarman. Dhanapatigrama then ruled Champa for the Khmer king. Khmer and Cham troops then fought Đại Việt together and attacked Nghe An in 1216 and 1218.[6]
Majumdar dated the Khmer withdrawal from Champa to 1220 and a peace to about 1222. Citing a Cham inscription, he called it the war of 32 years with Cambodia, from 1190 to 1222.[6] Briggs also gave 1220 as the year Champa regained its independence,[9] while Nhim Sotheavin, following Georges Maspéro, wrote that the Khmer troops seem to have left some time before 1218.[8] The next Cham king, Jaya Paramesvaravarman IV, had himself lived in exile at the Khmer court.[6]
Fall of Champa
In 1471 the Vietnamese emperor Thanh Ton invaded Champa and took Vijaya by assault. Majumdar wrote that the emperor sent a fleet of 100,000 men ahead and led 150,000 soldiers himself. He gave the Cham losses as 60,000 killed and 30,000 taken prisoner. The Cham king, Tra Toan, was captured and brought before the emperor, and he fell ill and died on a ship bound for Đại Việt.[6] Only the southern regions, Kauthara and Panduranga, remained to the Cham kings, behind a border stone in the mountains that end at Cape Varella.[6]
The end of Champa is dated differently. Majumdar described the kingdom after 1471 as reduced to Kauthara and Panduranga and at the mercy of Đại Việt.[6] Maunati and Sari date Vietnam's defeat of Champa to 1693.[5] Vickery wrote that Panduranga, the last part of Champa, lost its independence in 1692 but kept a special status, and that in 1832 its land was divided between two Vietnamese districts.[3] Theam and Higham place Champa's end in the 17th century.[1][4]
Migration to Cambodia
Cham people moved to Cambodia in several waves.[5] Magali An Berthon writes that Cham traders started to move to Cambodia after Champa fell in 1471.[10] Maunati and Sari date the early migrations to the end of the 16th century and the start of the 17th. They write that after Vietnam's victory of 1693 Cham people moved to Cambodia and also to Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.[5] Majumdar wrote that in 1822 the last Cham king, Po Chong, crossed into Cambodia with a group of exiles.[6]
In 19th-century Cambodia, the Cham and the Malays were Muslim communities with their own officials named by the royal court.[1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Bun Srun Theam, Cambodia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: A Quest for Survival, 1840-1863, MA thesis, Australian National University (1981)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Radio Free Asia Khmer, Chun Chanboth, Two kings reigning at the same time in the mid-11th century, part 13 of a history series (May 14, 2014; in Khmer)
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Michael Vickery, Champa Revised, ARI Working Paper No. 37 (March 2005)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Proceedings of the British Academy, Charles F. W. Higham, The Origins of the Civilisation of Angkor (2003)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 SUVANNABHUMI 6, no. 1, Yekti Maunati and Betti Rosita Sari, Construction of Cham Identity in Cambodia, pp. 107-135 (June 2014)
- ↑ 6.00 6.01 6.02 6.03 6.04 6.05 6.06 6.07 6.08 6.09 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 6.15 6.16 6.17 6.18 Punjab Sanskrit Book Depot, R. C. Majumdar, Ancient Indian Colonies in the Far East, Vol. I: Champa (1927)
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 Angkor Database, Maurice Glaize, The Monuments of the Angkor Group (1944; English translation of the fourth French edition)
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Sophia University, Nhim Sotheavin, Factors that Led to the Change of the Khmer Capitals from the 15th to 17th Century (undated)
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 The Far Eastern Quarterly, Lawrence Palmer Briggs, A Sketch of Cambodian History (August 1947)
- ↑ Royal College of Art, Magali An Berthon, Silk and Post-Conflict Cambodia: Embodied Practices and Global and Local Dynamics of Heritage and Knowledge Transference (1991-2018), PhD thesis (undated)