History of Champa
The history of Champa begins in prehistory with the migration of the ancestors of the Cham people to mainland Southeast Asia and the founding of their Indianized maritime kingdom based in what is now central Vietnam in the early centuries AD, and ends when the final vestiges of the kingdom were annexed and absorbed by Vietnam in 1832.
Abstract
One theory holds that the people of Champa were descended from settlers who reached the Southeast Asian mainland from Borneo about the time of the Sa Huỳnh culture, though genetic evidence points to exchanges with India. Sa Huỳnh sites are rich in iron artifacts, by contrast with the Đông Sơn culture sites found in northern Vietnam and elsewhere in mainland Southeast Asia, where bronze artifacts are dominant. The Cham language is part of the Austronesian family. According to one study, Cham is related most closely to modern Acehnese.Founding legend
Lady Po Nagar
Cham tradition says that the founder of the Cham state was Lady Po Nagar. She hailed from Khánh Hòa Province, in a peasant family in the mountains of Dai An. Spirits assisted her when she drifted on a piece of sandalwood to China, where she married a Chinese crown prince, the son of the Emperor of China, with whom she had two children. She then became Queen of Champa. When she returned to Champa to visit her family, the Prince refused to let her go, but she flung the sandalwood into the ocean, disappeared with her children and reappeared at Nha Trang to her family. When the Chinese prince tried to follow her back to Nha Trang, she was furious and turned him and his fleet into stone.Hồ Tôn Tinh
According to some Vietnamese textbooks, the kingdom Hồ Tôn Tinh existed around the same time with the mythical Hồng Bàng dynasty and was believed to be the first Cham kingdom.Part of its history was mentioned in the 14th-century Lĩnh Nam chích quái, with "The story of Dạ Xoa" :
The Sa Huỳnh culture
The Sa Huỳnh culture was a late prehistoric metal age society on the central coast of Viet Nam. In 1909, urns containing cremated remains and grave goods were discovered at Thanh Duc, near Sa Huỳnh, a coastal village located south of Da Nang. Since then, many more burials have been found, from Huế to the Đồng Nai river delta. The jar burials contain bronze mirrors, coins, bells, bracelets, axes and spearheads, iron spearheads, knives and sickles, and beads made of gold, glass, carnelian, agate and nephrite. Radiocarbon dating of the Sa Huỳnh culture remains range from 400 BC to the first or second century AD. The Sa Huỳnh exchanged items along maritime trade routes with Taiwan and the Philippines. "At present, the consensus of all evidence points to a relatively late intrusive settlement of this region by sea from Borneo, a move which stimulated the rise of Sa Huỳnh, and then the development of the Cham states."Field research conducted in the Thu Bon River Valley by joint British-Italian-Japanese archaeologists from 1999 to 2003 concludes that by the early centuries AD, late Sa Huynh settlements had developed into semiurbanized riverine and coastal port-cities, and ancient citadels such as Trà Kiệu and Gò Cấm might have become important trading hubs during the transition from late Sahuynhian culture to proto-Cham. By the third century AD, proto-Cham centers apparently had moved away from the sand dunes of the coast to further inland plains between rivers to avoid hostile conditions; in addition to the growth of fortified settlements, urbanization, trade, and expansion of rice cultivating communities along those rivers centuries afterwards, along with the improvement of road networks and overland communications, ultimately resulting in the emergence of more centralized state to be formed in the eight and ninth centuries.
Initial kingdoms
Ancient Champa–Central Vietnam is said, during the regency of Duke of Zhou, there was a tribe called Yuèshāng 越裳 brought two black pheasants and one albino to the court of the Zhou dynasty, presented as tributes. The Nanyue kingdom based from present-day Guangzhou, was founded by Zhao Tuo, a former Chinese general of Qin Shihuangdi. Nanyue projected its power into present-day northern Vietnam, which eventually then was becoming the southernmost parts of Nanyue. The region was annexed by the Han emperor Wudi in 111 BC, who incorporated those territories corresponding to modern-day north and central Vietnam into the Han Empire. Central Vietnam from south of Ngang Pass in Hà Tĩnh then became known as Rinan province, meaning "south of the sun."To the Chinese, the country of Champa was known as 林邑 Linyi in Mandarin and Lam Yap in Cantonese and to the Vietnamese, Lâm Ấp. According to Chinese texts, in 192 AD, a revolt erupted in Rinan led by Khu Liên, son of a local official, killing the Han magistrate in Xianglin county. Khu Liên then established a kingdom known to the Chinese as Lâm Ấp or Linyi. Over the next several centuries, Chinese forces made repeated unsuccessful attempts to retake the region.
File:Champa 526-539 CE.png|thumb|upright|Envoy of Champa to the Liang dynasty. Part of "Entrance of the Foreign Visitors of Emperor Yuan of Liang" made by the painter Gu Deqian of the Southern Tang dynasty
From its neighbor Funan to the west, Lâm Ấp soon came under the influence of Indian civilization. Scholars locate the historical beginnings of Champa in the 4th century, when the process of Indianization was well underway. It was in this period that the Cham people began to create stone inscriptions in both Sanskrit and in their own language, for which they created a unique script. One such Sanskrit inscription, the Vo Canh stele Pallava Grantha inscription hails from the early Cham territory of Kauthara, and establishes the descendant of the local Hindu king related to the Funan kingdom, Sri Mara. He is identified with both Champa founder Khu Liên and Fan Shih-man of Funan.
The Book of Jin has some records about Lam Ap during the 3rd to 5th centuries. Fan Wen became the king in 336. He attacked and annexed Daqijie, Xiaoqijie, Ship, Xulang, Qudu, Ganlu, and Fudan. Fan Wen sent a message and paid tribute to the Chinese Emperor, and the message was "written in barbarian characters". Lam Ap sometimes maintained the tributary status and sometimes was hostile to the Jin dynasty, and the Commandery of Rinan was frequently under attack from Lam Ap.
Archaeological excavations at Tra Kieu, an early Lam Ap/Champa site, show that the common assumption of Lam Ap as a merely "Indianized" polity is rather irrational and fundamentally misunderstanding. Instead, evidence gathered from excavations displays a fascinating, dynamic history of the early stages of formation of the Cham civilization, with artifacts reflect cross global influence and trade connections between early Champa with ancient Eurasian powers such as the Han Empire, the Gupta Empire, the South Indian Pallava dynasty, and the Mediterranean.
The first king acknowledged in the inscriptions is Bhadravarman, who reigned from 380 to 413. At Mỹ Sơn, King Bhadravarman established a linga called Bhadresvara, whose name was a combination of the king's own name and that of the Hindu god of gods Shiva. The worship of the original god-king under the name Bhadresvara and other names continued through the centuries that followed. Moreover, Bhadravarman's third inscription at Tra Kieu, which renders Old Cham, is the oldest surviving text of any Southeast Asian language. The authorities of king Bhadravarman might have spanned from nowadays Quảng Nam to Chợ Dinh, Phú Yên, near the Đà Rằng river.
Some historians doubt that the Cham of medieval time were direct descendants from the early state of what the Chinese called Lâm Ấp/Linyi which encompassed the present-day areas north of Hải Vân Pass to the Ngang Pass. Another significant issue that historians also concern is the Champa unitary theory argued by early scholarship who believed that there was only one single kingdom of early Champa and that was Lâm Ấp/Linyi recorded by the Chinese. Linyi left no textual information, while south of Linyi were the kingdoms of Xitu, Boliao, Quduqian, and dozens more kingdoms that their names had been lost to history. For example, William Southworth, hypothesizes that the emergence of Champa in the 6th century was the result of a gradual process of Chamic northward expansion from the Thu Bồn River valley to Thừa Thiên Huế and its periphery around the 5th to 6th century AD, though very faint. From 220 to 645, Chinese annals give almost the same title for rulers of Linyi: Fan 范, that may be connected with the Khmer title poñ found in seventh-century Khmer inscriptions. Michael Vickery proposes that the Linyi of what Chinese historians had described, was not the actual Champa or Chamic at all. Instead, Linyi's demographics might have been predominantly Mon-Khmer, perhaps the Vieto-Katuic ethnolinguistic branch.
Archaeologists also have discovered early 5th-century Cham sculptures showing different traits and styles per location, thus perhaps indicate the certainly existence of many different Proto-Cham kingdoms/settlements developed independently. Those archaic male and female sculptures and images, however, questioned by historians, whether they represent Indian Hindu gods, or could be purely local spirits and deities, revealing facets of early Cham religion and society. Some of the sculptures from Khanh Hoa, Phu Yen, Binh Dinh, and Quang Nam apparently share some similar elements with Gupta art of the 4th and 5th centuries.
The capital of Lâm Ấp at the time of Bhadravarman was the citadel of Simhapura, the "Lion City" at present-day Trà Kiệu, located along two rivers and had a wall eight miles in circumference. A Chinese writer described the people of Lâm Ấp as both warlike and musical, with "deep eyes, a high straight nose, and curly black hair."
According to Chinese records, Sambhuvarman was crowned king of Lâm Ấp in 529. Inscriptions credit him with rehabilitating the temple to Bhadresvara after a fire. Sambhuvarman also sent delegations and tribute to China and unsuccessfully invaded what is now northern Vietnam. George Cœdès states that this was actually Rudravarman I, followed by his son Sambhuvarman; their combined reigns extended from 529 to 629. When the Vietnamese gained a brief independence under the Early Lý dynasty, King Lý Nam Đế sent his general, Pham Tu, to pacify the Chams after they raided southern border, in 543; the Chams were defeated.
In 605, general Liu Fang of the Chinese Sui dynasty invaded Lâm Ấp, won a battle by luring the enemy war-elephants into an area booby-trapped with camouflaged pits, massacring the defeated troops, and captured the capital. Sambhuvarman rebuilt the capital and the Bhadravarman temple at Mỹ Sơn, then received Chenla King Mahendravarman's ambassador. In the 620s, the kings of Lâm Ấp sent delegations to the court of the recently established Tang dynasty and asked to become vassals of the Chinese court.
Chinese records report the death of the last king of Lâm Ấp in 756. Thereafter for a time, the Chinese referred to Champa as "Hoan Vuong" or "Huanwang". The earliest Chinese records using a name related to "Champa" are dated 877; however, such names had been in use by the Cham themselves since at least 629, and by the Khmer since at least 667. Some academics such as Anton Zakharov and Andrew Hardy recently have come to the conclusion that the Linyi of Chinese history texts and the Champa Kingdom from indigenous epigraphic sources might have nothing in common and are obscure, unrelated to each other.
At Mỹ Sơn, the name Campā occurs in the first time on an important Cham inscription code named C. 96 dating from metaphysically year 658 AD. Another undatable inscription from Dinh Thị, Thừa Thiên Huế mentions a king with titles cāmpeśvara and śrī kandarppapureśvarāya, perhaps attribute to Kandarpadharma, the eldest son of Sambhuvarman. Correspondingly, Cambodian inscription K. 53 from Kdei Ang, Prey Veng recorded an envoy dispatched from the ruler of Champa in 667 AD.