The Lost World of Cham: The Transpacific Voyages of the Champe

By Childress and David Hatcher

David Childress, popular author and star of the History Channel’s show Ancient Aliens, brings us the incredible story of the Cham: Egyptian-Hindu-Buddhist seafarers who ruled a realm that was as big as the Pacific Ocean. The mysterious Cham, or Champa, peoples of Southeast Asia formed a megalith-building, seagoing empire that extended into Indonesia, Fiji, Tonga, Micronesia, and beyond—a transoceanic power that reached Mexico, the American Southwest and South America. The Champa maintained many ports in what is today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia (particularly on the islands of Sulawesi, Sumatra and Java), and their ships plied the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, bringing Chinese, African and Indian traders to far off lands, including Olmec ports on the Pacific Coast of Central America. Statues in Vietnam of the Champa show men and women distinctly African in appearance and the Champa royalty were known to consist of nearly every racial group. They had iron tools and built megalithic cities of finely-cut basalt and granite, such as the city of My Son in central Vietnam. Its construction is identical to that at Tiwanaku in South America. Topics include: Who Were the Champa?; Cham and Khem: The Egyptian Influence on Cham; The Search for Metals; Trans-Pacific Voyaging; The Basalt City of Nan Madol; Elephants and Buddhists in North America; The Cham and the Olmecs; The Cham in Colombia; The Cham and Lake Titicaca; Easter Island and the Cham; tons more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adventures Unlimited Press
• Release date: Feb 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781939149763

Book preview

Borobudur.

Chapter One

WHO WERE THE CHAMPA AND CHAM?

By reason of the constant and repeated destructions by water and fire, the later generations did not receive from the former the memory of the order and sequence of events.

—Philo of Alexandria

My journeys in search of lost cities and ancient mysteries have taken me around the world, from the mountain peaks of the Andes to beneath the waters of the oceans. My search for the answers to such enduring mysteries as the building of megalithic walls in prehistory and evidence for ancient transoceanic contact has taken me from Mexico and Peru to Easter Island, Tahiti, Tonga, Micronesia, Indonesia and Vietnam. In fact, it was when I was in Vietnam in 2007 that I took an interest in the Champa civilization.

What I learned while in Vietnam surprised me—historians were unaware of any civilization in southern Vietnam or Cambodia prior to circa 192 AD. Not only that, but other areas of Southeast Asia also do not seem to have any history prior to about 600 AD. While countries like China, India, Persia and Mesopotamia have chronicles of history going back to 1000 BC or more, history is silent on Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand (before the Thais), Sumatra, Java and other Indonesian islands.

Surely, the great ships of India and China had been sailing these waters by 900 BC or earlier. Were there any known port-cities that were visited? What rulers reigned over these islands and rivers? What was their religion and what did these seafarers and kings know of the geography of their area—a vast area of thousands of islands and jungle rivers. On many of these islands are the remains of baffling megalithic structures and the evidence of ancient mining operations. Who were the people sailing these island seas and what did they call themselves? What my studies have shown me is that these people were a confederation of seafarers and farmers that were Hindus who called themselves the Cham and the general region Champa.

In central Vietnam, a few miles south of the famous DMZ of the Vietnam War (called in Vietnam the American War) was the mysterious capital of the Cham civilization, the impressive megalithic city of My Son. The Cham, or Champa, were a Hindu maritime people, apparently related to the Hindus of ancient Indonesia, whose influence can still be seen on the island of Bali, the last bastion of Hinduism in a predominantly Muslim country. They were also in direct contact with the Chinese.

The Cham (pronounced Kom) peoples inhabited much of central Vietnam and a group of islands off the coast called the Cu Lao Cham, or Cham Islands. I think that this island base, as well as cities up several rivers in the area, were once the center of an accomplished maritime trading empire—an empire that not only traded with China to the north and Indonesia to the south, but also with nations across the vast Pacific!

Eventually the Cham lost their island territories and there were wars with Cambodia and Sumatra. The Chinese also sacked the Champa cities in Vietnam and the Dai Viet tribes centered around Hanoi annexed all the remaining Champa territories by 1832 as they took over all of southern Vietnam. This migration south of the Dai Viet tribes drove the last of the Cham in Vietnam westward into the mountains that separate Laos from Vietnam today. At this time only a small number of Cham villages remain in the mountains of central Vietnam and northern Cambodia. Some of these Cham became Muslims toward the end of the 17th century, while other Cham retained their original Hindu faith.

The Lost World of the Cham

Having apparently arrived from India via Malaysia and Indonesia, the Champa kingdom was a federation of several smaller states called Mandala and comprised several ethnic groups. According to Ivan Van Sertima and Runoko Rashidi in their book African Presence in Early Asia,¹⁵ Chinese records from as early as 192 AD reference a kingdom in what is now central Vietnam known as Lin-yi, which meant land of black men. Its inhabitants possessed black skin, eyes deep in the orbit, nose turned up, hair frizzy. The kingdom of Lin-yi was known in Sanskrit documents as Champa, a substantially Indianized kingdom (Buddhist and Brahmin) with close contacts with India and China. Other states had names such as Huang-Wang and Chang-Chen.

The Cham territories of Vietnam included the coastal plains, highlands and mountain ranges. This area of Vietnam is very mountainous, with cliffs often coming right up to the coast. Occasional rivers and hidden bays are found along the coast, making it a rugged area best traversed by boat. An army marching through this region would not get very far, so the Cham harbors were something of a naturally protected territory. The Cham Islands off the coast were even more protected, and these islands were probably the central base for what is assumed to be a very large navy of the Cham.

The Cham were seafarers and rivermen, going deep into Cambodia (named after the Cham— Khmer in Sanskrit). In fact the larger area of southern Vietnam and Cambodia, including parts of Laos, was certainly controlled by the Cham from an early time, though many historians only acknowledge the Cham or Champa as being in southern Vietnam. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia says (with minor typos corrected):

The term Champa refers to a collection of independent Cham polities that extended across the coast of what is today central and southern Vietnam from approximately the 2nd century through 19th century (1832), before being absorbed and annexed by the Vietnamese state. The kingdom was known variously as nagara Campa (Sanskrit; Khmer) in the Chamic and Cambodian inscriptions, Chăm Pa in Vietnamese (Chiêm Thành in Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary) and Zhànchéng in Chinese records.

The Chams of modern Vietnam and Cambodia are the remnants of this former kingdom. They speak Chamic languages, a subfamily of Malayo-Polynesian closely related to the Malayic and Bali–Sasak languages.

Champa was preceded in the region by a kingdom called Linyi or Lam Ap (Vietnamese) that was in existence from 192 AD; the historical relationship between Linyi and Champa is not clear. Champa reached its apogee in the 9th and 10th centuries. Thereafter, it began a gradual decline under pressure from Dai Viet, the Vietnamese polity centered in the region of modern Hanoi. In 1832, the Vietnamese emperor Minh Mạng annexed the remaining Cham territories.

Hinduism, adopted from India since early in its history, has shaped the art and culture of [the] Champa kingdom for centuries, as testified with numbers of exquisite Cham Hindu statues, and red brick temples dotted the landscapes in Cham lands. My Son, a former religious centre, and Hoi An, one of Champa’s main port cities, are now World Heritage Sites. Today, some Cham people adhere to Islamic faith, a conversion which was started in [the] 15th century, and they are called Bani Cham. There are however, Balamon Cham (from Sanskrit: Brahman) people that still retain and preserve their Hindu faith, rituals and festivals. Balamon Cham people are one of only two surviving non-Indic indigenous Hindu peoples in the world, with a culture dating back thousands of years. The other one is the Hindu Balinese of Indonesia.

So, Wikipedia is saying the word Champa or Cham is Khmer in Sanskrit. It seems that the words Cham or Khem are interchangeable with the word Khmer as we witness in the modern name for Cambodia. It is not spelled Khembodia, but more simply Cambodia, showing that there is really no difference between the terms Cham and Khem (er).

The original Cham-Khmer were an ancient Hindu group, according to Wikipedia, that still survive as an ethnic group in central Vietnam and Cambodia; the dictionary compares them to the Hindus of Bali. I surmise that Bali may have originally been part of Greater Champa, a Hindu kingdom that encompassed much of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Some historians say that another Chinese word, Funan, refers to a different culture than the Cham, this one up the Mekong River in Cambodia. As will be discussed later, Funan and Champa are certainly one and the same. Cambodians, like the Champa, are a dark-skinned race with wide noses and thick lips and distinct from the lighter-skinned Thai, Dai Viet and Chinese peoples. The temples at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in central Cambodia depict men with thick lips and wide noses.

In fact, as I will show in this book, the Cham were not just all over the coasts of the Malayan Peninsula and at upriver sites in Cambodia, reached by the Mekong River, but they were present all over the islands of Indonesia. They went beyond the islands of Indonesia to New Guinea and the Philippines out into the Pacific and voyaged to Mexico, Colombia and Peru. Nearly any civilization in Indonesia or elsewhere in Southeast Asia that showed some Hindu influence was probably part of the Cham Empire. Says Wikipedia of the far-flung influence of the Cham that is only now being understood:

Evidence gathered from linguistic studies around Aceh confirms that a very strong Champan cultural influence existed in Indonesia; this is indicated by the use of the Chamic language Acehnese as the main language in the coastal regions of Pidie, Aceh Besar, Aceh Jaya, North Aceh, East Aceh, West Aceh and Southwest Aceh Regencies and the cities of Lhokseumawe and Bireuën.

While today the Balamon Cham are the only surviving Hindus in Vietnam, the region once hosted some of the most exquisite and vibrant Hindu cultures in the world. The entire region of Southeast Asia, in fact, was home to numerous sophisticated Hindu kingdoms. From Angkor in neighboring Cambodia, to Java and Bali in Indonesia.

So we have linguistic studies showing that northern Sumatra (Aceh) once apparently spoke a dialect of the Cham. If Sumatra and Vietnam were speaking the Champa dialect then it seems likely that other Indonesian islands such as Java and Bali were part of this Hindu maritime empire that spoke the Cham language. Wikipedia had noted that the Cham languages were closely related to the Bali-Sasak languages. This is further evidence that Champa really extended throughout Southeast Asia and included Sumatra, Java and Bali plus all the islands in their vicinity. Northern Sumatra is important because it is the gateway to Indonesia and the Gulf of Siam from India. As Hindu traders left ports on the east coast of India they would land in northern Sumatra and they were now in the land known as Champa or Suvarnabhumi (Land of Gold). The Chinese called this area Funan, as we will discuss a bit later.

Today the wealthy island-state of Singapore sits in this general area, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula opposite Sumatra. Singapore was not a desirable Champa site, however, because it was a huge swampy area in antiquity. The British drained these swamps and built Singapore. Champa ports were typically in sandy bays where a major river met the ocean. The Cham never had any major cities in the Mekong Delta area because of the unpredictable river, with its flooding and changing of course from time to time.

It would seem that the Cham had many cities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Sumatra, Java and elsewhere, but it seems that their most important city was the basalt, granite and brick city called My Son (pronounced Mee Sun).

Cham brick and stone towers Po Sa Nu near Phan Thiet.

An old photo of one of the temples at My Son.

The Megalithic City of My Son

In December of 2007, my wife Jennifer and I visited the most important of the Cham cities, the site known as My Son. My Son is situated in Quang Nam Province about 60 kilometers from the historic cities of Danang and Hue. It was an all day bus and boat ride, highlighted by a tour of the main group of monumental complexes scattered over an area of about 10 hectares.

My Son is the impressive remains of the holy city built over the centuries around the sanctuary of Bhadresvara (Shiva), which was thought to be founded in the early 4th century AD. Known as Amaravati in ancient times, it is situated in the center of a mountain chain and accessible only through a narrow gorge. Today, there are some seventy brick buildings still visible, constructed by the Cham kings to commemorate the great events of their reigns and to perpetuate the memory of the kings.

One of the temples at My Son has a curious inscription mentioning the Nagas, serpent gods in the Mahabharata, and a spear taken from Drona’s son, a priest named Asvatthaman. Drona is a king in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, and takes part in the great wars of antiquity. The founder of the Cham civilization is said to be a man named Kaundinya, who has this legendary spear from Drona. This is clearly thousands of years ago, as Drona would have lived circa 700 to 1500 BC. Some historians think that the Mahabharata was written as far back as 3000 BC. Says Wikipedia of the inscription about Kaundinya:

The story of Kaundinya is also set forth briefly in the Sanskrit inscription C. 96 of the Cham king Prakasadharma found at My Son. It is dated Sunday, 18 February 658 AD and states in relevant part (stanzas XVI-XVIII): It was there [at the city of Bhavapura] that Kauṇḍinya, the foremost among brahmins, planted the spear which he had obtained from Drona’s son Asvatthaman, the best of brahmins. There was a daughter of a king of serpents [nagas], called Soma, who founded a family in this world. Having attained, through love, to a radically different element, she lived in the abode of man. She was taken as wife by the excellent Brahmin Kaundinya for the sake of (accomplishing) a certain task…

So, according to the My Son inscription, the Champa civilization goes back thousands of years to the wars of the Mahabharata and was created by the union of a Hindu priest with a Naga goddess from the river waters—probably the Mekong River. An identical legend involving the daughter of a naga king exists in Cambodia.

According to Wikipedia the name Kaundinya is actually from southern India:

The name Kaundinya is well-known from Tamil inscriptions of the 1st millennium AD, and it seems that Funan was ruled in the 6th century AD by a clan of the same name. According to the Nán Qí shū (Book of Southern Qi) of Xiāo Zīxiǎn (485–537) the Funan king Qiáochénrú Shéyébámó (Kaundinya Jayavarman) sent in the year 484 the Buddhist monk Nàqiéxiān (Nāgasena) to offer presents to the Chinese emperor and to ask the emperor at the same time for help in conquering Línyì (north of Campā) . . . The emperor of China thanked Shéyébámó for his presents, but sent no troops against Línyì.

So we see from this inscription that the kings of Funan and the founder of Champa bear the same name: Kaundinya. Many historians make the mistake of thinking that Champa and Funan were different places, but since both Funan and Champa are ruled by a clan called Kaundinya, they are likely to be the same place.

My Son was a ritual center and had a nearby port at Hoi An on the Cau Do River. Opposite My Son, Hoi An and modern day Da Nang, off the coast of Vietnam, is the important Cham Islands sanctuary where thousands of Champa ships would converge from time to time. My Son was a religious center by the time of a Hindu king named Bhadravarman, towards the end of the 4th century AD. For centuries My Son was the main intellectual and religious center of Cham civilization and was the place where kings were cremated. Brick towers were built to commemorate each king’s great deeds of conquests. Even though the capital was moved to Tra Kieu (Quang Nam) and then to Tra Ban (Binh Ding) in about the year 1000 AD, construction at My Son continued until the 13th century. Scholars say that this gave rise to the longest religious occupation in Southeast Asia.²

Scholars at the museum in Da Nang say that the majority of the temples at My Son were dedicated to the Cham kings who, after their death, were associated with divinities of the Hindu pantheon, particularly Shiva. According to them, Shiva, with his third eye, long hair and trident was considered the founder of the Champa Dynasty. This, like the Kaundinya inscription referencing a king from the Mahabharata, means that the Cham kings considered their lineage to be very old—much older than the dates that historians right now give to the Cham, like 192 AD or 400 AD. The Champa obviously considered their lineage as going back thousands of years—was the realm of the Champa something going back to 1500 BC or before?

A brick and stone tower at My Son. Note the cut basalt door frame.

Monumental Cham architecture is basically identical to that found in Cambodia, and often features high shrine towers, with a door to the inside of the tower facing the east. There are false doors on the other sides. The doorways have elaborate designs carved into sandstone lintels and door jams. The shrine tower, generally referred to by its Cham name ‘kalan,’ is decorated with double pillars and arches in relief in its lower parts—a very complicated decoration of skillful stonework. The shrine tower is crowned with four stories of stone, each decreasing in size.¹

Cut and shaped basalt blocks at the ruins of My Son.

The temples and towers themselves are considered to be sculptural artifacts. They are decorated on the exterior of their brick walls with bas-relief columns, flowers, leaves and worshipping figures between brick pillars. The tympana, lintels and the ornamental corner pieces are of sandstone carved with figures of gods, the holy animals of the Hindus and more flowers and leaves. The greatest piece of architecture at My Son was an enormous, 70-foot-high tower that was destroyed by United States Army commandos in August of 1969. Unfortunately, the temple site is just a few miles to the south of the Demilitarized Zone and hence was considered fair game.

It is said that great treasure in the form of gold statues and jewels were kept in each shrine tower. But starting with the rise of Srivijaya in 645 AD the Champa were fighting wars with breakaway factions of the greater Champa Empire. They fought wars with the Khmer, a sort of civil war among the Cham, and then had Chinese and Dai Viet tribes attacking them. In fact, the Champa port of Qusu, located above the Kien Giang River, was a fortified city with a high wall and a surrounding moat as were other cities in Cambodia and the Champa parts of Vietnam. When Qusu was sacked by the Chinese in 446 AD, Chinese records says that all inhabitants over the age of 15 were put to the sword and as much as 48,000 kg of gold was taken from the city as loot. Indeed, Champa was the Land of Gold in Hindu geography.⁴ Where did it all come from?

The treasure kept in the shrine towers at My Son is said to have been entrusted to the Cham hill tribes, known as the Degar or Montagnard peoples.⁵ All of this valuable jewelry and precious metal objects became known as the treasure hoard of the Cham kings. These tribes still faithfully guard the treasures today, or so the story goes.

The Keystone Cuts of Cham

We were quite impressed by the stone and brick structures, and the fine decorations. I pointed out to our guide the use of keystone cuts, and metal clamps that were evident on some stone walls that had been partially demolished. He had never seen or heard of keystone cuts and clamps before, and was genuinely amazed at the discovery of these unusual construction techniques at the site. For that moment, I became the guide and he the tourist.

A photo of the T-shaped keystone cuts on granite blocks at My Son.

Many parts of My Son are constructed of large slabs of basalt that has been expertly cut and articulated. In some cases hourglass or T-shaped keystone cuts have been made into the basalt blocks. Basalt is a very hard rock and it is difficult to cut. Diamond drills and power tools are needed today to cut and articulate basalt slabs such as those at My Son. Did the Champa use power tools when building My Son? It would seem that they did. Also, the use of keystone cuts is a distinctive building style used almost exclusively on megalithic structures.

A basalt block at My Son with T-shaped keystone cuts on it.

Keystone cuts are an unusual and sophisticated method of fastening two stone blocks together. A cut is made on each block and then a molten metal clamp is poured into the cuts. When the metal (usually an alloy such as bronze) hardens, it then spans both blocks of stone and holds them together. Most megalithic blocks of basalt or granite are so heavy that they hardly seem to need metal clamps holding them together, yet the clamps were used anyway.

That this construction technique is used at certain unusual megalithic sites around the world is very curious, as this is not the sort of thing that would be independently developed on different continents. Keystone cuts identical to those found at My Son can be found in Peru at Ollantaytambo and Cuzco and at Tiwanaku and Puma Punku in Bolivia. These T-shaped and hourglass-shaped cuts are also found at Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Preah Vihear in Cambodia and at Borobadur in Java. They are found at the megalithic structures at Axum in Ethiopia and at temples in Egypt. They are also found at megalithic structures in Greece and Turkey as well as in India. In Mexico are found the 20-ton basalt heads of the Olmecs, worked in a similar fashion as the basalt slabs at My Son.

Hourglass-shaped keystone cuts on basalt slabs at My Son.

A photo of the T-shaped keystone cuts on granite blocks at My Son.

How is it that structures from various continents, and seemingly different time periods, are constructed in this unusual fashion? Many of the structures, such as those at Puma Punku, Tiwanaku and Ollantaytambo, are not easily explained and engineers are unsure how these huge structures, now mostly destroyed, were actually built. In some cases it would seem that the locals lacked the technology to quarry, articulate and lift some of the largest of the stones, often weighing many hundreds of tons. Obelisks, huge as they are, generally weigh around 400 to 500 tons.

If we assume that My Son was built by the Cham, then can we assume that the same engineers and stonecutters also built Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Preah Vihear? It would seem so, and it is likely that all of these structures were built around the same time. The structures in Cambodia are probably older than archeologists are now considering. This would be the same for those structures in Peru and Boliva that also contain keystone cuts. They are probably older than archeologists are currently saying. Are the builders of My Son and Tiwanaku, Puma Punku and Ollantaytambo one and the same? Megalith building and the use of keystone cuts in both Vietnam-Cambodia and South America is strong evidence for the transpacific voyages of the Cham.

The Advanced Construction Abilities of the Cham

The Cham built mostly out of stone and kiln-fired brick. Some of their work is in very hard basalt or nearly as hard granite—but high quality bricks were also used—something also seen in Peru and Bolivia.

While many of their early buildings were quasi-megalithic with keystone cuts and clamps used to hold large blocks together, the most important legacy of the Cham are the brick temples and towers that are scattered over the coastal lowlands and highlands. In these coastal lowlands is also found an ancient network of Champa wells that were used to provide fresh water to Cham ships or other vessels. Cham wells are recognizable by their square shape and many are still in use, providing fresh water even during times of drought.

The earliest towers are presumed to have been built around the year 192 AD, but many Cham sites and structures may be much earlier, including parts of My Son. These shrine towers were still being built during the 7th and 8th centuries and are concentrated in Quang Nam, Da Nang, Binh Dinh, Khanh Hoa, Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan. The famous Po Nagar Tower can be found at Nha Trang, a city known as Kauthara under the Champa. Nha Trang is famous for its sandy bay that could hold thousands of ships. Today it is a major beach-oriented tourist area.

The brickwork in Cham temples is so incredibly sophisticated and durable that a number of legends have sprung up about them. Ngo Van Doahn says in his book, Champa: Ancient Towers—Reality & Legend,¹ that the construction method of these buildings remains a mystery to modern architects and archeologists. He mentions an old Vietnamese legend that says that the Cham people built their towers from air-dried bricks, then shaped them, and finally heated the whole structure in a gigantic furnace. He mentions that at the beginning of the 20th century the French archeologist H. Parmentier commented on the foolish idea of this legend. Parmentier could not figure out how air-dried brick could withstand the tremendous weight of a structure that was 20 or 30 meters high before baking.

Cham brick and stone structures known as the Po Nagar Tower.

Since this seemed impossible, Parmentier surmised that the bricks must have been fired separately and were very hard. Yet, the structures were so finely built with the bricks so perfectly fitted together that it appeared that the structure had been fired all at once in a huge kiln. Fieldwork on the structures showed that mortar was used between the bricks, but that in the outermost layers of bricks, the mortar was so thin that the bricks look stuck together. ¹

The other mystery of the Cham brick construction is the elegant carvings found on the brick faces of many of the temples. The later Vietnamese wondered how it was possible to carve out bricks like stones, as they would normally crumble. This was one of the reasons for the legend of the towers being fired as a whole, rather than being built one brick at a time. Modern archeologists surmise that the motifs may have been carved on each brick as part of a larger pattern while still soft, and then the bricks were fired individually and each brick placed in its artistically appointed spot.¹

The Po Nagar Tower is in honor of a Chinese connection to the Cham. Says the Vietnamese website Asiatouradvisor.com of a tradition of a magical princess from Champa named Po Nagar:

Detail of some of the excellant brickwork at temples in My Son.

Po Nagar is an old Cham temple that was founded back in the 7th century and it is one of the oldest remnants of Cham civilization. It was built for the worship of the goddess of the country; Yan Po Nagar. She is reputed to have founded the nation of Vietnam. Legend has it that she once sailed all the way to China on a piece of wood. In China she met a handsome young prince and married him and bore him two sons. Then one day when she wished to return to the Kingdom of Champa to visit relatives; things went sour. The prince had a royal hissy fit and forbade her to leave. However, she grabbed her original piece of wood and snatched her children and disobeyed her husband to return home. The Chinese prince was not amused. He decided to punish his disobedient wife and brought a fleet to conquer her homeland and enslave her people. Unfortunately for him— she was also capable of great magic and she turned him and his crew into stone. Today she’s better associated with the Hindu goddesses of Bhagavati and Mahishuramardini and much of the lore associated with Yan Po Nagar has become theirs and vice-versa.

The Cham were thusly connected to the imperial lords of various regions of China, but also to the islands of Southeast Asia and the Malay Strait, where Singapore now lies, which led to the ports in India and Sri Lanka. The culture of the Cham was very distinctly Indo-Buddhist and they were thought to be largely dark skinned, but apparently were of every racial type.

The Chinese actually called the many lands of the Champa Funan, which meant Pacified South, referring to the high quality of civilization to be found there. Other outsiders were typically referred to as barbarians by Chinese scholars.

The Mystery of the Land of Funan

The Land of Funan was certainly the same land as Champa, but how extensive was this territory? Certainly it was a network of ports well beyond southern Vietnam and the Mekong River.

Says Wikipedia about Funan:

Based on the testimony of the Chinese historians, the polity Funan is believed to have been established in the 1st century CE in the Mekong Delta, but archaeological research has shown that extensive human settlement in the region may have gone back as far as the 4th century BCE. Though regarded by Chinese authors as a single unified polity, some modern scholars suspect that Funan may have been a collection of city-states that were sometimes at war with one another and at other times constituted a political unity.

From archaeological evidence, which includes Roman, Chinese, and Indian goods excavated at the ancient mercantile center of Oc Eo (from the Khmer Ou Kaeo, meaning glass canal) in southern Vietnam, we know that Funan must have been a powerful trading state. Excavations at Angkor Borei in southern Cambodia have likewise delivered evidence of an important settlement. Since Oc Eo was linked to a port on the coast and to Angkor Borei by a system of canals, it is possible that all of these locations together constituted the heartland of Funan.

This Wikipedia article is clearly describing the vast realm of the Champa, called by the Chinese Funan, the Pacified South. Writers on Funan seem to think it is different from Champa, yet the Chinese sources do not mention Champa at all. Rather than the land of Champa being separate from Funan, it would seem that they are the same country—and that Champa was far more extensive than originally believed. Indeed, until about 650 AD, it is my contention that all Hindu-Buddhist areas of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, were the land of the Cham.

It seems that for the Chinese, the land of Funan starts in central Vietnam, the exact site of My Son and the Cham Islands and includes the Mekong Delta of Southern Vietnam and Cambodia, the interior waterways of Cambodia all the way to Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, plus the Malayan Peninsula to Singapore and the islands of Sumatra and Java to the south. The lands of the Cham and the land of Funan are the same territory. What other culture was there? Until the rise of Srivijaya in Sumatra, circa 650 AD, it seems that the Champa ruled the Indonesian seas and their ports.

The Legendary Origins of Funan

The Chinese have a curious story about the origin of Funan. Chinese scholars say that an ancient text called The Book of Liang (compiled in 635 AD) records the story of the foundation of Funan by a foreigner named Huntian who came from a southern country called Jiao. This unknown country would seem to be India, Sri Lanka or possibly Sumatra.

The story goes that this Huntian fellow had a dream that his personal genie had directed him to embark on a large merchant ship and to take a magical bow with him on the journey. Huntian, with his dream fresh in his mind, proceeded to the temple in the morning where he found a marvelous bow (complete with magical arrows) at the foot of the genie’s special tree.

Huntian then set sail in his great ship, presumably going north to southern Vietnam. The genie caused the great ship to land in the Mekong Delta area—a core Champa district. Huntian met with the locals, who did not wear clothes, and discovered that the queen of the country, named Liuye (Willow Leaf), wanted to seize his ship. Huntian then shot a magical arrow from his divine bow at Liuye’s ship. The magical arrow pierced through Liuye’s ship and almost sank it. The frightened warrior queen surrendered to Huntian, and the man from the south founded the highly civilized society known by the Chinese as Funan.

The text also mentions that Huntian was unhappy to see his wife run around without any clothes, so he folded a piece of material to make a garment through which he made her pass her head. Finally, the origin of Funan concludes with: Then he governed the country and passed power on to his son, who was the founder of seven cities.

So now we have the familiar tale of seven cities applied to Funan and therefore to Champa. The Spanish searched for the Seven Gold Cities of Cibola, so should we be looking for the Seven Gold Cities of the Cham? These great cities, if My Son and Angkor Wat are good examples (which they are), may be far-flung indeed. The Seven Cities of the Champa might include My Son, Po Nagar, Angkor Wat, Preah Vehear, Borobadur, and others.

Says Wikipedia about Huntian and the establishment of Funan:

According to modern scholars drawing primarily on Chinese literary sources, a foreigner named Huntian established the Kingdom of Funan around the 1st century CE in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam. Archeological evidence shows that extensive human settlement in the region may go back as far as the 4th century BCE. Though treated by Chinese historians as a single unified empire, according to some modern scholars Funan may have been a collection of city-states that sometimes warred with one another and at other times constituted a political unity.

The ethnic and linguistic origins of the Funanese people have been subject to scholarly debate, and no firm conclusions can be drawn based on the evidence available. The Funanese may have been Cham or from another Austronesian group, or they may have been Khmer or from another

Reviews for The Lost World of Cham

[Jami Daniel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book, however he could have left out the wikipedia info as I find its not a reliable source.