Chams

Based on Wikipedia: Chams

They were there first. Before the Vietnamese pushed south, before the Khmer Empire swallowed Cambodia, the Cham people built a civilization along the coast of what we now call central Vietnam. They were seafarers, traders, and temple builders who controlled the maritime highways connecting China to India for over a thousand years. Then, piece by piece, their world was erased.

Today, most people have never heard of Champa. But its fall represents one of history's most complete conquests—a civilization that didn't just lose a war, but lost its land, its independence, and nearly its existence.

Sailors from Distant Shores

The Cham people are Austronesians, part of that remarkable family of seafaring peoples whose ancestors left Taiwan thousands of years ago and spread across an almost inconceivable expanse of ocean. Their cousins populated Madagascar off Africa's coast, Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific, and everything in between. The Malays, the Filipinos, the Polynesians—all relatives.

But the Chams did something unusual. Instead of settling islands, they landed on the mainland of Southeast Asia, probably somewhere between 1000 and 500 BCE. They came from Borneo, most scholars now believe, navigating their outrigger canoes to the river mouths along Vietnam's central coast.

This made them outsiders from the start. The mainland already had people—the Mon, the Khmer, and others who had walked there overland from the north. These were Austroasiatic peoples, linguistically and culturally distinct from the ocean-going Austronesians. The Chams were, in a sense, colonizers from the sea who carved out a niche between the mountains and the water.

They chose their territory wisely. The river outlets they settled became natural ports, and ports meant trade. The Chams positioned themselves at the crossroads of the ancient world's most lucrative shipping lanes. Silk and porcelain from China heading west, spices and gems from Indonesia heading east, cotton and philosophy from India heading everywhere—all of it passed through Cham waters.

The Principalities of Champa

By the second century of the common era, the Chams had organized themselves into something historians call Champa—though this wasn't a unified kingdom in the way we might imagine. Think of it more like ancient Greece: a collection of independent city-states sharing a common language, religion, and culture, sometimes allied, sometimes at war with each other.

The Chams built temples. Magnificent ones. If you've seen photographs of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, you have some sense of the style—the Hindu-Buddhist architectural traditions that swept across Southeast Asia during the first millennium. The Chams absorbed Indian culture through trade, adopting Hindu gods, Sanskrit writing, and Indian ideas about kingship. Their temple complexes, like My Son in central Vietnam, still stand as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

But here's what made Cham society genuinely unusual: despite adopting patriarchal Hindu religion and royal traditions, the Chams remained stubbornly matrilineal. Inheritance passed through women. Family identity traced through mothers, not fathers. This wasn't just a quaint custom—it would later become a matter of life and death, and the reason for some of the harshest laws the Vietnamese would impose on their conquered subjects.

A Goddess Born of Sea Foam

Every culture tells stories about where it came from. The Chams said their people descended from a goddess named Po Nagar, who emerged from sea foam and clouds at the beginning of time. She was their divine mother, their protector, the spiritual embodiment of the land itself.

Interestingly, the Vietnamese later adopted Po Nagar after conquering Champa, but they rewrote her story. In the Vietnamese version, she's called Thiên Y A Na, and instead of emerging from the primordial ocean, she's a peasant girl from the mountains who floats to China on a sandalwood log, marries royalty, and eventually returns home to help the poor. Same goddess, completely different origin story. Conquerors rarely destroy the gods of the conquered—they absorb them, rewrite them, claim them as their own.

The Coming of Islam

For most of their history, the Chams were Hindu and Buddhist, like their neighbors. But starting around the ninth century, something new began to filter into their ports: Islam.

Muslim merchants from Gujarat in India had become increasingly prominent in Asian maritime trade. They brought their faith with them, just as Hindu and Buddhist traders had brought theirs centuries earlier. The process was gradual—it would take seven hundred years before Islam became the dominant religion among the Chams.

A medieval Arab geographer named Ad-Dimashqi wrote in 1325 that Champa was "inhabited by Muslims and idolaters"—idolaters being his term for Hindus and Buddhists. He claimed Islam had arrived during the time of the early Caliphs, when Muslims fleeing political persecution in the Middle East sought refuge in distant lands. Whether or not that's literally true, it captures something important: Champa was a place where refugees could go.

The conversion accelerated in the fifteenth century when Cham refugees began fleeing Vietnamese conquest. Many ended up in Malacca, a sultanate in what's now Malaysia that had formally adopted Islam in 1414. There, the Chams encountered Sunni Islam in its Southeast Asian form, and many converted. When they returned home or maintained ties with their homeland, they brought the new faith with them.

By the seventeenth century, the Champa kingdom had become an Islamic sultanate. The kings converted, the Jawi script—Arabic letters adapted for Malay—replaced Sanskrit-derived writing, and the Chams joined the broader world of Muslim Southeast Asia.

But they never fully abandoned their older ways. Even today, Cham Muslims maintain matrilineal practices that would seem foreign to Muslims elsewhere. And a significant minority of Chams remained Hindu, particularly those who stayed in Vietnam rather than fleeing to Cambodia. The Cham people would become one of the only groups in the world to have indigenous populations practicing both Islam and Hinduism.

The Long Defeat

The destruction of Champa happened in stages over roughly eight hundred years. It's a story of being caught between empires.

To the west lay the Khmer Empire, the civilization that built Angkor Wat. The Chams and Khmers fought repeatedly throughout the twelfth century, a rivalry between two wealthy, sophisticated powers competing for regional dominance. In 1177, the Chams pulled off a stunning military coup: they launched a naval invasion across the great lake Tonlé Sap and actually captured and sacked the Khmer capital of Angkor. It was a shocking humiliation for the Khmers.

But the Khmers recovered under their king Jayavarman VII, defeating the Chams just four years later in 1181. The empire of Angkor would continue for another two and a half centuries, though it never again reached its former heights. The Chams, meanwhile, had made a powerful enemy.

The more existential threat came from the north: the Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese were expanding southward from their homeland in the Red River delta, a process they called Nam Tiến—the "Southern Advance." It was their manifest destiny, their centuries-long drive to push their borders ever further down the coast. And Champa lay directly in their path.

The decisive blow came in 1471. The Vietnamese army numbered around 300,000 soldiers. The Chams could muster only 100,000. The mathematics were brutal: 120,000 Chams were killed or captured in a single campaign. The Cham capital was destroyed. The kingdom was reduced to a small enclave near Nha Trang, a fraction of its former territory.

Many Chams fled to Cambodia, beginning a diaspora that continues to shape the ethnic makeup of Southeast Asia today.

The Ban on Marriage

The Vietnamese conquerors understood something about Cham society that informed their strategies of domination. Because the Chams traced lineage through women, Cham identity was perpetuated through Cham mothers. A child of a Cham mother was Cham, regardless of who the father was.

So in 1499, the Vietnamese made it illegal for Vietnamese men to marry Cham women. Any social class, any circumstance—forbidden. The law was designed to prevent Vietnamese men from being absorbed into Cham families, their children becoming Cham rather than Vietnamese.

It was, in effect, a law against the Cham people reproducing their own culture.

The Vietnamese also, according to historical records, issued orders to kill all Chams in the capital vicinity. This was ethnic cleansing, punctuated by occasional massacres, continuing over centuries.

The Final Annexation

A remnant Cham kingdom called Panduranga survived for another two centuries, a shadow of former Champa, paying tribute to Vietnam and trying to maintain some autonomy. It ended in 1832, when the Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mạng formally annexed the last Cham territory.

The response from the Cham Muslims was jihad. A religious leader named Katip Sumat, who had studied Islamic law in Kelantan on the Malay Peninsula, declared holy war against the Vietnamese. Revolts flared. The Vietnamese suppressed them with characteristic brutality.

The methods were designed to break the Chams spiritually as well as militarily. Vietnamese authorities force-fed pork and lizard meat to Cham Muslims, violating their religious dietary laws. They force-fed beef to Cham Hindus, for whom cows were sacred. The goal was cultural destruction, forcing the Chams to violate their deepest religious principles.

A second revolt erupted between 1834 and 1835, led by a religious teacher named Ja Thak Wa. It was crushed in July 1835. By 1885, only 40,000 Chams remained in what had once been Panduranga—a population reduced by conquest, massacre, forced assimilation, and flight to perhaps a tenth of what it had once been.

The Last King Flees

The final Cham Muslim king was named Pô Chien. When Panduranga fell, he faced a choice: submit to Vietnamese rule, or flee. He chose flight, gathering his people and heading south into the Cambodian interior.

Those Chams who lived along the coast went in different directions. Some sailed to Trengganu in Malaysia. A small group went north—counterintuitively, toward China—and settled on Hainan Island, where their descendants are known today as the Utsuls. They still speak a Chamic language called Tsat, though they've lived in China for nearly two centuries.

King Pô Chien's followers scattered across the Mekong Basin in Cambodia, forming the Cham communities that still exist there today. Cambodia became the refuge for Cham Muslims fleeing Vietnamese persecution—an irony that would turn bitter in the twentieth century.

Cham Influence Beyond Champa

Here's something remarkable about the Chams that rarely gets mentioned: they helped spread Islam across Indonesia.

A Cham princess named Dwarawati married the seventh king of the Majapahit Empire, the most powerful state in Indonesian history. Through her influence, the royal family converted to Islam, and the conversion cascaded through the realm. Her tomb still exists in Trowulan, at the site of the old Majapahit capital.

Even more significant was a man named Raden Rakhmat, better known as Sunan Ampel. He was born in Champa in 1401, the son of an Arab missionary and a Cham princess who was Queen Dwarawati's sister. Sunan Ampel traveled to Java in 1443, ostensibly to visit his aunt, but he stayed to become one of the legendary Wali Sanga—the Nine Saints who are credited with spreading Islam throughout Java.

Sunan Ampel is considered the focal point of the Nine Saints because so many of the others were either his students or his descendants. He may have built the Great Mosque of Demak, one of the oldest mosques in Java. He died in 1481 and is buried at the Ampel Mosque in Surabaya, where pilgrims still visit his tomb.

In other words, the Chams—a conquered and scattered people—played a pivotal role in the Islamization of the world's largest Muslim-majority country. Their influence rippled outward even as their own homeland was being erased.

Cham Diaspora in the Philippines

Long before their final defeat, Cham merchants had been trading throughout Southeast Asia. Some settled in Sulu, in what's now the southern Philippines, as early as the tenth century. The locals called them Orang Dampuan—people from Champa.

At first, there was tension. The indigenous Buranun people grew envious of the Orang Dampuan's wealth and massacred them. The survivors retaliated. Eventually, peace was restored and commerce resumed, but the violence left its mark. The Yakan people of Basilan Island are said to be descended from these Cham settlers.

What did the Orang Dampuan bring with them? According to some historians, civilization itself—or at least, civilization in its Indic form. They brought Hindu-Buddhist cultural elements, writing systems, and political organization to a region that had been less connected to the broader Asian world.

The Twentieth Century Catastrophe

By 1954, when Vietnam was divided into North and South, most Chams lived in South Vietnam. A few thousand who had joined the communist Viet Minh went north during the population exchanges, along with around ten thousand indigenous highland peoples from various ethnic groups.

Surprisingly, North Vietnam was initially more welcoming to ethnic minorities than the South. The communist government broadcast propaganda radio in several highland languages—Rhadé, Bahnar, and Jarai—trying to win support from the South's indigenous peoples. They promised autonomy and equal rights.

Whether those promises were sincere became irrelevant when the communists won in 1975.

But the real catastrophe happened next door, in Cambodia.

Remember that Cambodia had been the refuge for Chams fleeing Vietnamese persecution. By the twentieth century, substantial Cham communities had lived there for generations. Some had embraced communism as a response to discrimination by the Cambodian colonial and royal governments. A Cham elder named Sos Man joined the Indochina Communist Party in the 1950s and rose to become a major. He and his son, Mat Ly, created the Eastern Zone Islamic Movement and became mouthpieces for the Khmer Rouge, encouraging Chams to join the revolution.

The Khmer Rouge tolerated this Islamic Movement between 1970 and 1975. Then they took power.

What followed was genocide. The Khmer Rouge targeted the Chams for destruction because of their distinct ethnic identity, their religion, and their refusal to abandon either. Starting as early as 1972 in some regions, Chams were forced to eat pork, forbidden to pray, prohibited from speaking their language or wearing traditional dress. Mosques were destroyed. Cham villages were broken up, the residents scattered and dispersed among Khmer populations.

Then the killing began in earnest.

The Chams were one of several ethnic groups that the Khmer Rouge specifically targeted for extermination. Out of a Cambodian Cham population of perhaps 250,000 before 1975, between one-third and one-half were murdered during the four years of Khmer Rouge rule. Some estimates go higher. Entire communities were wiped out.

The people who had fled Vietnamese ethnic cleansing found themselves facing Cambodian genocide.

Survival and Identity

The Cham people still exist. They number perhaps half a million across Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and scattered communities elsewhere. The largest population is in Vietnam, where they are officially recognized as one of the country's 54 ethnic groups. In Cambodia, they form the country's largest Muslim minority.

They still speak Cham, an Austronesian language written in its own script—one of the few indigenous writing systems of mainland Southeast Asia still in use. They still practice both Islam and Hinduism, sometimes in the same village. They still trace lineage through women, a tradition that has survived Hindu influence, Islamic influence, Vietnamese persecution, and Khmer Rouge genocide.

Most of the world has never heard of them. Their ancient kingdom is a footnote in Vietnamese history, mentioned mainly as the people who were conquered. My Son, their greatest temple complex, receives a fraction of the tourists who visit Angkor Wat, even though it represents the same civilization, the same religious influences, the same architectural traditions.

What does it mean for a people to survive the loss of their homeland? The Jews did it, maintaining identity through two thousand years of diaspora. The Armenians did it, surviving genocide to maintain their culture and eventually recover a state. The Chams have done it too—without recovering a state, without global recognition, without much acknowledgment that they were there first.

The Question of Land

Here's the uncomfortable reality that the Cham story forces us to confront: most of the places we live were taken from someone else.

The Vietnamese who now populate central Vietnam took that land from the Chams. The Khmers who fought the Chams had themselves displaced earlier peoples. The Austronesians who became the Chams had sailed from Taiwan, where indigenous peoples still live who were there before them. And those indigenous Taiwanese peoples had ancestors who came from somewhere else too, if you go back far enough.

This doesn't make conquest right. The ethnic cleansing of the Chams was a crime—the massacres, the forced feeding of forbidden foods, the laws designed to prevent cultural reproduction, and especially the Cambodian genocide. These things deserve to be remembered and condemned.

But it does make the question of who "really" belongs somewhere impossibly complicated. The Vietnamese have now lived in former Champa longer than the United States has existed. At what point does conquest become history? At what point do the conquerors' descendants become the indigenous people?

The Chams don't have good answers to these questions. They simply continue to exist, maintaining their language, their religions, their matrilineal traditions, in countries that were built on their dispossession. They are a living reminder that history has no final chapter, that conquered peoples don't always disappear, and that the question of who belongs where is never as simple as the people currently in charge would like it to be.

They were there first. They're still there now. Somewhere between those two facts lies everything we need to know about the nature of nations, conquest, and survival.