The 17 essays in this beautifully illustrated and well-mapped volume display a significant advance in Cham studies using archaeological, epigraphical, geographical, linguistic, iconographic, and textual materials. They build upon an extensive accumulation of prior scholarship; the bibliography covers 37 pages. In general, the volume indicates an interpretive move away from scholarship on Champa during the past few decades that tended to portray Champa as an archipelago of independent political territories; it turns slightly back to earlier generations of scholars who thought of Champa as a unified kingdom. But this book shows that the issue is more complex than that. The depth of detail provided by the authors shows not just how much we are now able to know but also how much remains unknown. For every assertion or hypothesis there is at least one new question. Nevertheless, much has been achieved and the questions are changing. The following brief survey of the book's contents will give an indication of why I consider it to be an important publication.
Lâm Thị Mỹ Dung, ‘Champa settlements of the first millennium: New archaeological research’, looks at archaeological materials from the first millennium and concludes: ‘No clear evidence of the introduction of Buddhism and Hinduism to central Vietnam in the early phase (1st–2nd centuries CE) has yet come to light, and we will need to pay more attention to traces of exogenous religious culture’ (p. 38). This may well reflect the archaeological record for that time, but an argument can be made that textual materials indicate a Hindu mode of veneration in ancient Vietnam no later than the first two decades of the 3rd century CE; see my ‘What lies behind the earliest story of Buddhism in ancient Vietnam?’, Journal of Asian Studies 77, 1 (2018).
Yamagata Mariko, Nguyễn Kim Dung, and Bùi Chí Hoàng, ‘The development of regional centers in Champa, viewed from recent archaeological advances in Central Vietnam’, studies an array of artefacts, such as roof tiles and stamped jars, that indicate contact with Han China, primarily from sites associated with Trà Kiệu in Quảng Nam. The authors ‘are inclined to think that the spread of roof tiles for wooden buildings in Central Vietnam was one of the manifestations of an ‘alliance’ of regional centres that developed in the 3rd century .… [T]his ‘alliance’ was known to the Chinese and described as Linyi in their records, and then developed into the kingdom known locally as Champa, as Indian influence became crucial’ (p. 62).
Federico Barocco, Nguyễn Tiên Đông and Andrew Hardy, ‘The archaeological territories of Champa in Quảng Nam and Phú Yên: Two new maps’, looks closely at two river valleys: the Thu Bổn valley in Quảng Nam and the Đà Rằng valley in Phú Yên; the authors propose that remains in these places reveal a similar ‘highly original urban model’ beginning from the early 5th century. This model and its ‘local adaptations’ are formulated as an infrastructure of social, economic, and political networking. The authors cite Bennet Bronson's ‘downstream-upstream model’ and William Southworth's hypothesis that the Đà Rằng valley competed with the Thu Bổn valley for supremacy at that time. The morphology and provenance of this model are not addressed by the authors, but their descriptions of archaeological materials in the two regions raise important questions for future researchers.
Amandine Lepoutre, ‘The place of “Upper Campa” in Southeast Asia, through Jaya Harivarman's inscriptions (mid 12th century)’, features the role of Jarai leaders in the uplands of Central Vietnam in the relations between Angkor and Champa to emphasise ‘the strategic role of highlander societies in regional relations since at least the middle of the 12th century’ (p. 97).
Thérèse Guyot-Becker, ‘An introduction to Cham law, based on 18th-century legal documents from the Panduranga Royal Archives’, provides a very interesting use of Cham judicial records to analyse four legal cases in the 18th century when Cham leaders governed Cham territories under Vietnamese supervision. The author shows how these cases reveal class structure, including different degrees of bondage.
Andrew Hardy and Nguyễn Tiên Đông, in ‘The peoples of Champa: Evidence for a new hypothesis from the landscape history of Quảng Ngãi’, make good use of textual and linguistic materials to argue that the inhabitants of lowland Quảng Ngãi during the Cham epoque were speakers of Mon-Khmer, in particular Hrê, rather than Cham, yet identified themselves as people of Champa: ‘the (Austronesian) Cham-speaking people were not the only inhabitants of Champa's plains … we explore the hypothesis that people speaking the (Mon-Khmer) language today known as Hrê, who live in Quảng Ngãi's western districts, are descended from the Champa-period inhabitants of that territory's coastal plain’ (p. 126). The authors take their departure from Michael Vickery's idea that the Cham upstream was Mon-Khmer, but find evidence that, at least in Quảng Ngãi, and perhaps in other regions as well, this was also true of the Cham coastal plain. The authors display an admirable use of evidence to build their argument, and they conclude: ‘a monolingual population of lowland Champa can no longer be assumed’ (p. 44).
Anton O. Zakharov, ‘Was the early history of Campa really revised? A reassessment of the classical narratives of Linyi and the 6th–8th-century Campa kingdom’, analyses the Sanskrit inscriptions in the Thu Bổn Valley (Quảng Nam) and argues that ‘the identification of Champa with Linyi gives rise to many problems’ (p. 156). The author aims to critique the idea that Champa was not a unitary state and proposes that Champa was a unitary state whose borders changed through time. Contrary to other authors in this volume, Zakharov believes that Linyi cannot be equated with Champa. This touches a critical point in the historiography of Champa. It might be noted that in Sinic texts, Linyi emerged from within the southern frontier of the Han empire and, during the time of its ascendance, operated as a saprophyte on the reconstituted edge of the post-Han ‘Southern Dynasties’. Han renegades were prominent in Linyi, even becoming kings (see my A history of the Vietnamese, 2013, pp. 28–33).
Mara Landoni, ‘Architectural evidence for the chronology of a temple's construction: Mỹ Sơn G1 and its Annex’, accompanied with photographs and map, studies a distinctive temple complex in Quảng Nam, and concludes that it was built all at one time under King Jaya Harivarman in 1157 as ‘a means of delivering a political message. The decorative elements suggest a fusion of different cultural traditions … the product of a collective economic effort … the monument's construction was a political act, whereby the victorious leader proclaimed his right to the kingship of Champa’ (p. 177).
John K. Whitmore, ‘The fall of Vijaya in 1471: Decline or competition? Champa in the 15th century’, argues against the idea that in the 15th century Champa was weakened by internal decline, which then led to its historic defeat by Vietnamese in 1471. He instead attributes this defeat to the Cham inability to compete with the Vietnamese for control of trade along their common seaboard.
Arlo Griffiths, ‘Epigraphical texts and sculptural steles produced under the Virabhadravarmadevas of 15th-century Campa’, analyses inscriptions to affirm the political unity of Champa in the fifteenth century and the continued strength of connections with India and Java. The argument rests upon royal inscriptions, which are dated from 1401 to 1443, distributed from Quảng Nam to Đồng Nai, that the author finds to refer to the same king.
Andrew Hardy, ‘Champa, integrating kingdom: Mechanisms of political integration in a Southeast Asian segmentary state (15th c.)’, follows the trend of thought in the previous two chapters (Whitmore and Griffiths) to develop a text-based study of what happened in 1471. The author concludes that Champa did not disappear but rather ‘splintered’ into an ‘array of minor entities’ (quoting Paul Wheatley), the strength of which ‘explains why, as the kingdom disintegrated, its parts were so slowly absorbed into Vietnam’ (p. 252). According to the author, in the 15th century until 1471, ‘contradictions were inherent in the Champa political system … the kingdom existed in constant tension with its constituent parts. It required constant integrating’ (p. 251).
Geoff Wade, ‘Campa in the Ming Reign Annals (Ming shi-lu) 14th–17th centuries’, presents a detailed summary of information about Campa from the perspective of the Ming imperial court, documenting Ming engagement with Cham rulers and their representatives. This chapter shows the rather significant degree to which the Ming court acknowledged Champa's existence.
Marc Brunelle, ‘Revisiting the expansion of the Chamic language family: Acehnese and Tsat’, proposes revisions of two ideas about the expansion of the Cham language that have gained attention in recent years: that Acehnese derives from Cham-speakers immigrating from the Vietnamese coast and that Utsat (or Tsat), spoken in southern Hainan, derived from emigrants speaking a northern Chamic dialect as early as the 11th century. The author argues ‘that the ancestors of the Acehnese are unlikely to have ever transited through Campa’ and that ‘the Utsat might have settled in Hainan later than 1471’ and had arrived from a location further south on the Vietnamese coast than previously asserted (p. 289). The author points out evidence for ‘the Malayo-Chamic’ language family being spoken in Borneo before spreading to mainland Southeast Asia and Sumatra and that ‘Acehnese probably split from Chamic much earlier than usually believed, and might never have transited through central Vietnam’; furthermore, ‘as for the ancestors of the Utsat, the evidence we currently have would seem to suggest that most of them left later than previously proposed, from an area corresponding to modern-day Khánh Hoà or Ninh Thuận in south-central Vietnam’ (p. 302).
Stephen A. Murphy, ‘Cultural connections and shared origins between Campa and Dvaravati: A comparison of common artistic and architectural motifs, ca. 7th–10th centuries C.E.’, proposes that as early as the 7th century artists/artisans from Mỹ Sơn in Quảng Nam had moved to Muang Fa Daed in eastern Thailand and from the 8th century artists were circulating in both directions, concluding that there was ‘frequent movement of people back and forth between Dvaravati sites in central and northeast Thailand and those in Campa’ (p. 320).
William A. Southworth and Trần Kỳ Phương, ‘The discovery of Late Angkorean Khmer sculptures at Campa sites and the overland trade routes between Campa and Cambodia’, discusses contact between Campa and Cambodia during the 12th and 13th centuries: ‘The discovery of Khmer stone sculptures in close proximity to known trade routes in the north of Campa, compared to their absence in the south, has called into question the likelihood of a direct road connecting Angkor to the province of Bình Định’ (p. 342).
Pierre Baptiste, ‘Đồng Dương Temple iconography: Study of a pedestal with Mara’, proposes a reconstruction of the iconography of this temple to conclude that ‘the originality of the Đồng Dương Temple owes much to the mix of influences and the enhancement of its Buddhist iconography by the Hindu tradition’ (p. 343).
Parul Pandya Dhar, ‘Pride and penitence of an anti-hero: Ravananugraha as motif and metaphor in India and Campa’, argues that the Ravana/Siva story in Indian iconography romanticises the relationship between Siva and Uma, but in Champa the focus is the Siva-Ravana antagonism with Uma put aside; the author suggests an overlay of the Buddha-Mar episode upon the Siva-Ravana story and concludes that ‘A well-known Saiva iconographic formula is deliberately adapted to a Buddhist context … [which] highlights the way networks of cultural influence and the creative process of localization operate in the interests of power’ (p. 355).
The contributions to this volume move forward our understanding of Champa by opening new vistas of thought for future research. Four areas of inquiry come to mind. First, the question of the relationship between what Chinese sources refer to as Linyi and what we are trying to imagine as Champa is sure to be complex, as is evident from the different opinions expressed in this volume. I think more attention might be given to the extent to which Linyi was first of all a phenomenon of the post-Han Southern Dynasties southern frontier (3rd–6th centuries), a phenomenon that apparently did not survive beyond the mid-Tang era (8th century). Perhaps it was similar to how the Franks emerged on the Roman Rhine River frontier (2nd–5th centuries); but while Rome did not revive and the Franks built their Merovingian kingdom, the Tang empire was strong enough to dominate its southern frontier, bringing to an end whatever Linyi might have been.
Second, this volume emphasises what we have begun to suspect in recent years: that the relationship between the coastal and upland regions was an important element in the Cham kingdom. This volume gives us more data to ponder in this direction.
Third, we see the importance of historical linguistics for our study. We can never have enough of it. Linguistics is a worthy ally of textual analysis, epigraphy, and archaeology.
Finally, the basic theme of the volume remains for further consideration: What was the nature of ‘Champa’ — a unified kingdom or an archipelago of associated polities? This volume leans toward the unified kingdom, reacting against a previous generation's vision of a related yet dispersed set of political units. I expect that future generations will continue to react one upon the other until the question itself becomes moot as our depth of understanding grows beyond our present imagination. I believe that this volume will be an important step in this process of growth.
