The Art of Champa. Jean-François Hubert

Vijaya in 1377, the year that the Chams recaptured Thang Long. In 1380, Nghe An, Dien Chau and Thanh Hoa were pillaged. In 1382, 1383 and 1389, Che Bong Nga accumulated victories and raids, until he was killed by the Viets in 1390. His successor, Jaya Simhavarman Sri Harijatti, was unable to maintain his hold over the region north of the Col of Clouds that he reconquered. At the end of his reign in 1400, the decadence of Champa was already inscribed. At the northern frontier, Dia Viet mobilised enormous military forces. Within the borders, Sanskrit culture, an indispensable support for both Hinduism and Mahayanism, was not renewed and died out (the last Sanskrit inscription in Champa can be dated to 1252) as regular and direct relations that Champa kept with India were interrupted by Muslim invasions of India at the end of the twelfth century. In addition, and this is a classic historical fact, the Hindu elite that held its legitimacy in the gods no longer inspired the confidence of their inferiors since concretely the Khmers, the Chinese and above all the Vietnamese appeared in the long term as superior warriors, due to their victories, and therefore in the eyes of the Chams (ruled and even rulers) as the representatives of better political systems. As of the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Viets took the principality of Amaravati (that, today, is the south of Quang Nam and the north of Quang Ngai). In 1471, having got over one more Chinese invasion in 1407 and its subsequent devastating occupation – the Chinese destroyed everything that had any element of “Vietnaminity” – and having suspended their “Nam Tien”, the Viets recaptured the principality, in far more drastic fashion: the Cham capital Vijaya was conquered by King Le Thanh Tong who razed the city, beheaded 40,000 people, deported 30,000, and imposed on the Chams what the Chinese had done to the Viets sixty years earlier by systematically wiping out all traces of “Chamity”. In 1471, the Chinese world imposed itself locally on the Hindu world that had dominated the eastern part of Indochina since the fourth century AD. It was in Vijaya, that year, that the frontier marker between the Chinese world and the Indian world was established in the name “Indo-China”.

      17. Mukhalinga, Sandstone, height 48 cm (without tenon), Preangkorian art, 7th Century.

      Both works are covered in marine concretions. The most recent is unique in Cham sculpture, while the older one manifests a similar inspiration.

      The disappearance of Hindu Champa was more than just nominal: the Viets, faithful to their soldier-farmer concept, cultivating the land that one protects and protecting the land that one cultivates, preferred to ensure the stability of a conquered territory before invading another; therefore, the occupation stopped at the Cu Mong col whereas victorious troops had already reached Mount Thac Bi, considerably further south. A military chief in Vijaya, Bo Tri Tri, became the vassal of Dai Viet and was given responsibility for Kauthara, Panduranga and all of the related west (the High Plateaus); the limits of a new Cham kingdom were defined, whose sovereign even obtained the investiture of the Chinese emperor in 1478.

      However, while this new kingdom was labelled Cham, if the former system is taken into consideration, it was no longer Hindu. On the contrary, ideologically it rested on a very complex base that drew from the animism of southern peoples supplemented by later Indian additions and, from the seventeenth century, Islam, the religion of the Prophet that, although it was present in the region as from the twelfth century, only truly took root then in the ports and cities. As we will see, it is obvious that classic Cham statuary was no longer of the same type as well as growing rarer from the sixteenth century on. But changing style does not mean no longer existing: the Chams were not only not annihilated but rebelled against the Nguyen, princes of the south, in conflict with the Trinh, princes of the north, all under the supposed authority of the late Le sovereigns. In 1594, they also assisted the sultan of Johore to combat the Portuguese from Malacca. However, the Nguyen soon crushed Cham ambitions. In 1611, the entire northern part of Kauthara to Cape Varela was conquered, transformed into the frontier province Tran Bien and populated with 30,000 prisoners, former partisans of the Trinh. The Nguyen refused to pay the taxes due the Le for the territories that the Nguyen controlled and they also refused to pay homage. The submission of Champa thereby became a source of legitimacy: entrusted with a real “mandate from the heavens”, they added new territories and vassals. Later, in 1653, the frontier was drawn in the Cam Ranh region after a war in which the Cham king Po Nraup committed suicide; only a single of the five original provinces, Panduranga, remained Cham. It was progressively broken up: the Nguyen, beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century, took over a part of what still was at that time the Khmer delta; in 1658 the region that today is Bien Hoa was occupied and for the first time the Viet danger thus came from the south as well, meaning that any attempt by the Champs at reconquest ran the risk of being strangled. In 1692 an endeavour to win back what had been Kauthara by the king Po Saut was severely repressed by the Nguyen: Panduranga was turned into a Viet county named Binh Thuan of which, cleverly, the administration was entrusted to the brother of the defeated king though with a Viet mandarin title. This therefore marked the end of Champa as an independent country. However, following a Cham revolt the next year, the Nguyen lord re-established Panduranga with full rights. The monarchy was restored, with a nominated king, Po Saktiraydaputih, who owed an annual tribute to the Nguyens. This slowly but surely progressively rubbed out Champa or what was left of it; judicial exception was granted to the Viets who lived in the country: the Binh Thuan prefecture administrated them directly, even within the borders of Panduranga. This privilege of jurisdiction as well as administration led, within the Cham country, to the existence of an increasing number of zones where the Chams were bereft of rights since Viet immigration to lands left uncultivated – won and lost by the Chams or simply purchased by the Viets – meant that the political, economic, social and therefore cultural influence of the Viets rapidly increased, at the expense of the Chams’. Po Dharma even used the expression “real puzzle” to describe the Panduranga of his day.

      18. Kut, Sandstone, height 80 cm, Yang Mum style, ca. 15th Century (detail).

      19. Sitting Lion, Nearly free-standing, sandstone, height 30 cm, Chien Dan Style, 10th – 11th Century.

      From the end of the eighteenth century until 1832, the Chams withered away more and more quickly. First, the Tay So’n revolted against the Nguyen in 1771 which turned Panduranga-Champa into the favoured battleground, as it was of strategic interest to the two opponents. Until 1801, fighting raged, with its accompanying devastation. Then, despite the remittance of a small autonomous zone between the bay of Cam Ranh, the region of Ba-ria and high Dong-nai that was given to Po Sau Nun Can, brother in arms of the emperor Gia Long (formerly Nguyen Anh who had bested the Tay-Son in 1802) the final blow was dealt by the son and successor (1820) of Gia Long, Emperor Minh Menh. He chose one of his henchmen to govern this zone and thereby regained control of it little by little, even in the face of opposition by Le Van Duyet, a faithful follower of Gia Long and viceroy of Gia Dinh Thanh. At his death in 1832, Minh Menh eradicated all remaining opposition, encompassed Panduranga in his hegemony and tied it administratively to the circumscriptions of An Phuoc and Hoa Da in the Binh Thuan province.

      In 1832 Champa was at its definitive end, although there were a few tragically repressed outbursts such as that of 1833-34 during the Holy War (jihad) led by the Muslim religious dignitary, the Katip Suma, and that of the fight for independence of Ja Thak Va, to which his death in 1835 put an end.

      Then began, after the one set off by the fall of Vijaya, the second decline of the Chams. This time, not only the elite but the entire population was concerned. Everything, under Viet auspices, had to disappear, including habitations: the Chams were dispersed in hamlets belonging to Viet villages and only later identified as one of the 54 minorities of the Viet country…

      Cham Architecture

      20. The Cham Temple of Po Klaung Garai, c. 1920.

      21. An example of a possible reutilisation of Cham stone (basis of the pole of a house…).

      To approach Cham architecture, one must first identify its ruins. “Pillaged and sacked over