The Illustration, in its 21 July 1877 issue, related the tragic incident: the sinking steamboat was depicted with sixty-six passengers and 180 officers and crew reaching, thanks to longboats, with more or less difficulty, the shore that was luckily close by.
To locate with precision the place where the boat had sunk, Stenuit, for three long years, consulted numerous archives, notably those of the Messageries Maritimes and the former Protectorate of Aden; he studied manuscripts and maps and decided to set up an expedition to recover the statues. He was financed by two Americans from Pennsylvania, Mr. Edwards and his son.
On 9 October 1995 a boat sailing from Djibouti reached the site north of Somalia. Of course, the crew knew that the shipment had been pillaged at the time of the wreck by the Somalians in exchange for sparing the lives of the survivors and camels to carry them to the north coast. However, Stenuit was practically sure that the Cham stone pieces, due to their weight and their minimal interest for local inhabitants, had remained in the sunken ship. For the submarine archaeologists, the problem appeared simple to resolve: here was a sunken ship whose structure corresponds to that of the Mekong and its orientation on the sea floor as described in the Illustration (stern to the south, prow to the north). The search, carried out with the help of a magnetometer placed in a longboat christened Docteur Morice in homage to the Frenchman, resulted in the identification of a wreck among eight potential ships, the area being somewhat of a marine graveyard. The inscription Messageries imperials (Imperial Transport) on plates brought up to the surface confirmed the successful identification. In this way, statue after statue, eighteen pieces in all, were brought up. However, Robert Stenuit was dissatisfied; the number was insufficient, as his initial estimation based on his knowledge of the list of pieces expedited foresaw at least ten other pieces. In fact, better exploitation of archives allowed him, upon his return to France, to learn that a first shipment, sent before the shipwreck, had reached Marseille and then Lyons. After some difficulties and thanks to an astonishing intuition, Stenuit located the ten missing statues at the Museum of Natural History in Lyons, where they had joined the zoological and botanical samples sent back to his home town years earlier by the doctor from Lyon.
To quote a lovely remark of Stenuit’s, these pieces he found stacked in a hallway at the museum, had been “buried rather than swallowed by sea”. A plain label mentioned for one of them: “Head of monster. Sandstone. Origin unknown. Cham art, 13th – 14th centuries. Received in 1933. MGL 2415”.
The pieces collected during Robert Stenuit’s expedition, including these, were separated in a sale at Christie’s in Amsterdam.[2] The catalogue lists fourteen numbers for thirteen complete pieces and seven fragments.
The twofold interest of Stenuit’s search is, first, it facilitated dating certain Cham pieces more precisely[3] and, second, it challenged certain commonly accepted pedigrees as a result of its other lesson. Steinuit’s “expedition” shows that the search for the origins of pieces is always tricky, particularly concerning Cham art; the Natural History Museum label bears witness: dated 1933, the arrival of the piece was much earlier (1877). Luckily, certain public documents permitted the truth to be established. What would it have meant if the facts had been left to faulty individual memories, adding confusion as generations went by, between Khmer and Cham or Indian art, all seen under the banner of an abusively generic “Far East”?
9. Andre Maire (1898–1984), The Tra-Kieu Buddha, 1956. Charcoal and chalk on paper, 65 cm × 50 cm, Signed and dated at bottom left.
Two years before his final return to France, the French artist, who was a teacher at the School of Architecture of Dalat at the time, went on with his work based on an imaginative and poetic reinterpretation of reality. Here, a Cham elephant from the 10th Century, probably drawn at the museum in Tourane, is incarnated in a temple, itself inhabited by a large Buddha (seen from the back), possibly a reminiscence of Dong Duong…
The History of Champa
10. The Cham Temple of Po Klaung Garai, c. 1920.
11. Collection in the main room of the Cham Museum in Tourane, 1922.
Someone visiting Vietnam today, exploring Phan Thiet, Phan Ri and Phan Rang or even Chau Doc, coming across people who are sometimes curiously dressed, would find it difficult to believe that they, the Chams, occupied practically two thirds – in length – of modern Vietnam. In the tenth century, the Khmer Empire and Champa were the main powers of continental South-east Asia, while, to the north, Dai Viet was nothing but a very young kingdom after having been a province of the Chinese Empire for over a thousand years.
Our sources for knowledge of the history of Champa are both textual and archaeological.
For one, there are Chinese and Vietnamese texts (the Annals), the accounts of travellers (from Chinese and Arab to Occidental missionaries and Marco Polo), Cham manuscripts (notably those kept at the Inventory of Archives at the Asiatic Society of Paris), epigraphy (about 210 inscribed stones – written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries at times in Sanskrit, at times in old Cham, sometimes in both languages – have been recorded). Many of them are still waiting to be translated, a complicated task, as it requires a real knowledge of the general history of the country that pure linguists do not have.
There are also archaeological vestiges, the original Cham towers, from Hoa Lai to Chien Dan, from My Son to Po Klaung Garai and so many others, still with us despite the ravages of time and the terrible destruction due principally to the second Vietnam war.
Then one could add to these sources the memory of the Vietnamese Chams, eighty thousand in the provinces of Binh Thuan and Ninh Thuan in central Vietnam, fifteen thousand in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and Chau Doc (An Giang province) close to the Cambodian border, as well as their hundred and fifty thousand “fellow citizens” in Cambodia who survived the barbaric Khmer Rouge. The Chams of central Vietnam are of Brahmanical heritage (Ahirs, or Kaphia or Chuh, Chams), the others follow a particular Muslim cult (Bani Chams). To these two groups must be added the three hundred thousand inhabitants of the High Plateaus who belong to the Austro-Asian language group (Mnongs, Naas and Stiengs) or the Austronesian language group (Jarais, Rhades, Churus, Ra-glais) who participated wholly in Champa’s history, the inhabitants of the plains – those called the Chams – evidently not having been the only inhabitants of the Cham country.
Champa appears in Chinese texts as of the second century. It spread over territories that stretched from north to south, from the Gate of Annam (Hoanh So’n) practically to Ho Chi Minh City (Baigaur in Cham) between the eighth and tenth centuries, and it reached west as far as the Mekong, as witnessed by the Khmer site in Laos, Vat Phu, the stele of Vat Luang Kau or the Prasat Damrei Krap of Mount Kulen in Cambodia, or the expedition led by Doudart de Lagrée that, going through Bassac in 1883 noted that the peoples there still remembered the Chams.
If written proof of the early presence of Chams on the High Plateaus were needed, one could refer to the inscriptions of the Kon Klor temple in the valley of Bla near Kontum that have been dated to 914, that mention the construction by a local chief by the name of Mahindravarman of a sanctuary dedicated to the god Mahindra-Lokesvara, or to other inscriptions such as those of the Yang Prong temple (late thirteenth-early fourteenth centuries), or to the temple of Yang Mum (late fourteenth-early fifteenth centuries)…
The history of the Champa, its beginnings remaining incompletely understood, is made of victories and defeats