Kingdom of Champa

Interesting.

Based on this historical background, do you think Indochina, in general, tends today more toward Buddhist and Hindu civilization models, or more toward a Chinese Confucian model?

 

Edited by pikeshot1600

Some Pictures

http://bierstedt.com/Vietnam/Vietnam29.jpg

http://asiaforvisitors.com/vietnam/central/myson/thumbs/elep hants.jpg

 

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/596636/2/i stockphoto_596636_sanskrit_stela.jpg

 

Edited by AthaNnikIcHaA

pikeshot1600 wrote: Interesting. Based on this historical background, do you think Indochina, in general, tends today more toward Buddhist and Hindu civilization models, or more toward a Chinese Confucian model?

Annam, what is now Northern Vietnam - Chinaes influence greater

Champa, what is now Souther Vietnam - Indian influence greater

On the topic of "Vietnamese surnames", I found the following quote from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name

"Virtually all family names are Chinese in origin, although a few (particularly in the south) have been traced to Cham origins, but presumably have been Vietnamized."

I was wondering if there's any Vietnamese forumer here who knows anything about that.

I've found more information on the Chams:

http://www.cpamedia.com/articles/20010703_01/

The Champs: Survivors of a Lost Civilisation

The Cham are perhaps the oldest and least-known people of Indochina. Inheritors of a proud tradition that stretches back almost two thousand years, Champa was the first Indianised Kingdom in Indochina. Its founding predates both the beginnings of Cambodia in about 550 AD, and the first major expansion of the Vietnamese south from the Red River delta of Tonkin in the mid-10th century.

Our earliest records of Champa are Chinese, dating from 192 AD. In these dynastic annals the people of Lin-yi, or Champa, are described as having 'dark skin, deep-set eyes, turned up noses and frizzy hair', trends which are still often recognisable in the modern descendants of the Chams today. The annalist records that the Chams dress 'in a single piece of cotton or silk wrapped about the body. They wear their hair in a bun on the top of their head, and they pierce their ears in order to wear small metal rings. They are very clean. They wash themselves several times each day, wear perfume, and rub their bodies with a lotion made of camphor and musk'.

At the peak of their power, about 12 centuries ago, the Chams controlled rich and fertile lands stretching from north of Hue, in central Annam, to the Mekong Delta in Cochinchina. Yet today Vietnamese cities like Da Nang and Nha Trang dominate these regions. Only mysterious brick temples, known familiarly as "Cham Towers", dot the skyline around Thap Cham and Po Nagar, Cha Ban and My Son, whilst in Cambodia the name of an eastern province and its capital, Kampong Cham, remain as mute testimony to the passing of a kingdom. The question arises, what happened? And where are the Chams - those that survive - today?

The origin of the Chams, like that of most peoples, is lost in the mists of time. Unlike most other inhabitants of Southeast Asia north of the Malay peninsula, they are an Austronesian people, more closely linked with the islands of the Malay-Indonesian world and the Philippines than with the mainland. We can surmise - but no more - that at some distant time they migrated by sea from the Indonesian Archipelago and settled in what is now central Vietnam.

The bases of what we know of early Cham society would seem to bear out this hypothesis. Unlike their Viet and Khmer neighbours, whose societies are based on intensive rice cultivation, the Cham seem to have had little time for agriculture. Champa's prosperity was based on maritime trade - and more than probably on a degree of piracy. Champa's principal exports seem to have been slaves (mainly prisoners of war) and sandalwood. This latter commodity, which was of great importance to the intensely religious societies of early Southeast Asia, brought considerable riches.

Much of this wealth seems to have been expended on building "Cham Towers" - exquisitely decorated, brick-and-sandstone keeps and temples dedicated to the first major religion of Champa, a form of Shaivite Hinduism which was introduced from India by sea during the early centuries AD. Even today, despite the ravages of time, these symbols of Cham civilisation remain impressive, not least for their masterful masonry. Layer upon layer of hard-baked brick are fitted together apparently without mortar, and yet so precisely that it is all but impossible to insert a knife blade between any two sections.

The most important and extensive Cham tower complex was raised at My Son, Champa's pre-eminent religious centre, about 50 kilometres west of Da Nang. Simhapura, the political capital - known today as Tra Kieu - was located nearby, about half-way between Da Nang and My Son.

Tran Ky Phuong, Director of Vietnam's excellently-appointed Cham Museum in Da Nang, explains that although there are many Cham temples and towers scattered throughout coastal southern Vietnam, the main reason there is no single major site comparable to Angkor or Pagan is because 'the Cham were traders. As such they did not have a strong attachment to the land'. Yet it was this very proximity to the sea which brought Hinduism to the Chams - their first world religious tradition - just as it would bring their second, Islam.

Arab merchants reached Guangdong in southern China as early as the 7th century AD, and it seems clear that they stopped along the central Vietnamese coast en route for provisions and trade. The first concrete evidence of such intercourse - and of an Islamic presence in Vietnam - is a 10th century stone pillar inscribed in Arabic which was found near the coastal town of Phan Rang.

As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, from Aceh to Sulu, Islam seems to have spread peacefully through commerce and intermarriage. The egalitarian message of the new religion may have appealed to the poorer classes, Hinduism being most closely associated with the Cham aristocracy. Be this as it may, the Cham Kingdom was destined to lose its independence before the new religion could effect a full conversion.

With the emergence of the powerful Cambodian Kingdom of Angkor in about 800 AD, and the renewal of Vietnam's territorial expansion to the south just over a century later, Champa found itself hopelessly outnumbered and caught in a politico-cultural vice between Khmer Buddhism and Vietnamese Confucianism. This vice gradually tightened with the Vietnamese, in particular, pushing the Chams south towards the Mekong Delta.

In 1471 the outnumbered Chams suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese. 60,000 of their soldiers were reportedly killed, and another 60,000 carried into captivity. Champa was reduced to a small sliver of territory in the region of Nha Trang, which survived until 1720, when the king and many of his subjects fled to neighbouring Cambodia rather than submit to Vietnamese conquest. The Cham Diaspora dates from this period, and the diverse Cham communities later established in Cambodia, Thailand and Laos can trace their common origin to this catastrophe.

Today there are about 77,000 Chams in Vietnam, living mainly in the coastal provinces of Thuan Hai, Khanh Hoa and Phu Yen, as well as in the Mekong Delta province of Chau Doc. Although sharing the same linguistic and historical tradition, they remain divided into two quite distinct religious communities, the Hindu Chams and the Cham Bani, or Muslims. The latter are easily distinguished by the men's preferred headgear - a crimson fez with a long golden tassel, or white Muslim prayer cap.

The two groups live peacefully side-by-side, as they do with their Viet neighbours, but there is no marriage between them. This rigid taboo is deeply rooted in the past, as is underlined in an epic poem of the Cham, Araya Cham Ni, which relates the tragic outcome of a love affair between a Hindu boy and a Muslim girl. In a nominally atheist society, it is a reflection of the continuing power of religion that such spiritual differences continue to divide a people which has survived Viet conquest, French colonialism, and American intervention in Indochina.

 

Some Pics

A mosque in Siem Reap, Cambodia

 

Crescent moons against a stormy monsoon sky, Vientiane, Laos.

Jahed elders reading Koran scripts in ¡°old Cham¡± the ancient Cham language.

Bali is majority Hindu so it isn't surprising. How do you known so much about aboriginial religion? Which part of Australia?

www [three brothers bundjalung]

Could you give that website again.

I don't see how there could be any Indian influence on the east coast of Australia, on the Northern coast there was almost certainly contact between Indonesians and Aboriginies so a transmission of hindu culture and religion is quite possible.

Where do you live by the way?

The Chams were a race of pirates and slave traders.  They were a thorn in the side of the Vietnamese, Khmers and even the Thais.  Vietnam overran Champa in 1471, massacring 10's of thousands and taking as many as slaves.  Many others fled to Malaya, Cambodia and Hainan Island.  Needless to say, the relationship between the Vietnamese and the Chams was a 1000 year old blood feud.

They were tough adversaries.  Militarily, they did better against the Vietnamese than the Mongols ever did.





Edited by TranHungDao - 01-Jun-2007 at 04:30

Sander wrote: Welcome to a new member . Good to see that some SEANS have found this forum,

Thanks

Sander wrote: There were often pirates and slavetraders  but they were much more than that. And slavetrade and piracy were practiced by Vietnamese ( and the others mentioned) as well,

 
Not anywhere near as much as the Chams.  The Chams lived in the Central highlands of Vietnam.  This area was by far less fertile than the Red River Delta of the northern and the Mekong Delta of the southern part of Vietnam.  Han census data shows that the northern Vietnam had some of the most densest population in the world.

Also, the Chams had been preying upon Vietnamese during the Chinese occupation, practically from the time they were began as an organized state.  Now this should inform you that if such tiny, tiny state is willing to prey upon the massive Chinese empire, then they are very much a bunch of "wilds".

If "geography is destiny", then the Chams were forced to be wilds by the very land they occupied:  The Chams had to make a living slave trading and piracy.  If you go back to Dongsonian times, or the first millenium BCE, and look at Vietnamese art, then you'll see nothing that pertains to war, despite the Red River Delta's spectacular population density.  Vietnamese, prior, to being sandwich between two predators, namely the Chinese and the Chams, were basically peaceful, relatively speaking, and later learned to be violent out of necessity.

Mind you, a land is generally peaceful until it hits a certain population density, at which point, the competition for resources naturally drives people to murder each other.  Now, if said land is highly fertile & capable of sustaining rather large numbers of people, then the people will be peaceful--relatively speaking.

Perhaps this is why the Vietnamese state of Van Lang, circa 700-600 BCE was so easily conquered by a handful of refugees from a conquered Yueh state to establish the short lived state of Au Lac in about 257 BCE.  Au Lac also occupied the Red River Delta and is considered to be Vietnamese.  It was conquered & annexed by Tried Da (in 207 BCE) who established Nam Viet in 211 BCE, which was headquartered in what is now Canton, China.

Sander wrote: but if that is the only thing that is mentioned , it can suggest that the Vietnamese were a bunch of wilds.

If slave taking and piracy can label one "wild", then the Europeans, and certainly the Dutch are far wilder than the Vietnamese by any measure.  Dutch colonies were amongst the most brutal.  It's hard to swing a dead cat without hitting someone "wild", no?

Sander wrote: Chams had very well organized polities for more than 1000 years and were very developed in all aspects.  As far as solid evidence goes they were even SEA ´s first literate state.

1.  Vietnamese, or rather the people of the Red River Delta, had were the center of the Dong Son culture, which was the first to do bronze casting.
2.  The Vietnamese also invent wet rice cultivation.  The rice growing world grows rice by this method.
3.  Vietnamese probably learned writing from our hated Chinese conquerers prior to the founding of the Chams.
4.  Europeans who had come to Vietnam had always remarked in their now surviving journals, and in typical racist fashion, that Vietnamese were far more advanced/cultured than the people they met in surrounding countries including Chinese, Asian Indians, Khmers, Laos, Thai....  Vietnam probably had the highest literacy rate in the world according Stanley Karnow (Vietnam: A History), about 80% if memory serves me, just prior to French colonization, after which it dropped to 15%.  At this time, Japan was less than 50% literate--again, if memory serves me.  Europe and America was even less so--correct me if I'm wrong.

Sander wrote: although some nationalistic touches occur here and there in the postings.

Touché

Sander wrote: Hm.. in some postings is a lot of nationalism and denigrating talk towards other etnicities. Maybe Knights can take a look. it would be great if our new member does not call Chams wilds or tries to suggests they were, as done several times now.