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According to scholar Thái Văn Kiểm, our people’s long march towards the South is an obvious historical fact that veritable foreign historians must recognize, and it is also a source of great pride for our nation. For over a thousand years, the Vietnamese people have crossed more than five thousand kilometers, or 1,700 meters a year or 5 meters a day. This speed is even less than that of a snail. This proves that our people have encountered many obstacles and have sometimes had to stop and take a step back on this long march. In a way, this folk song evokes the anxiety and fear of the Vietnamese people on this journey strewn with pitfalls:
Đến đây đất nước lạ lùng
Con chim kêu cũng sợ, con cá vẫy vùng cũng lo.
This land seems very strange to them
The chirping of birds also frightens them, as does the restlessness of fish.
Despite the fact that our population stood at around one million against a giant China estimated at the time at over 56 million subjects, we were led to discover the incredible talent of Ngô Quyền, who succeeded in freeing our people from Chinese domination for almost a thousand years. Unfortunately, he reigned for only 5 years. Then came the period of national unrest with the twelve warlords. Fortunately, the hero Đinh Bộ Lĩnh from Ninh Bình province emerged. He succeeded in eliminating them, unifying the country under his banner and founding a new dynasty, the Đinh dynasty. During this period, our country had just become an independent nation, but was confined only to the Red River delta and the small plains along the central coast of North Viet Nam (Thanh Hóa, Nghệ An).
In the North, it is difficult to begin territorial expansion because of the presence of China. This country had a large population and always caressed the intention of annexing our country at the opportune moment, whatever the reigning dynasty. At the West stand the rugged Trường Sơn mountain range, which is difficult to cross, and at the East is located the East Sea, which Nguyễn Trãi had occasion to mention in the “Proclamation on the Pacification of the Ngô (Bình Ngô Đại Cáo)” as follows:
Độc ác thay, trúc Nam Sơn không ghi hết tội,
Dơ bẩn thay, nước Đông Hải không rửa sạch mùi.
What cruelty! The bamboo of the southern mountains can’t record all their crimes,
What filth! The water of the Eastern Sea can’t wash away their stench.
to allude to the cruelty of the Ming (Chinese) that the East Sea failed to erase during the ten years of their aggression against the Great Yue (Đại Việt). This is a pressure that our people always had to endure during the course of our nation’s formation. Only in the South lies the only way for our nation to expand its borders, avoid extermination and maintain national independence, especially as our ancestors remain the only tribe of the Bai Yue who have not been assimilated by the Chinese since the time of Qin Shi Huang Di (Tần Thủy Hoàng).
However, at this moment in time, in this march towrds the South, our people have two undeniable advantages, one of which is to have a brilliant strategist to defend against Chinese invaders in the North, and the other is to succeed in involving the mass popular movement in this expedition for legitimate reasons. In the South, there is a kingdom called Lin Yi (later Champa), which succeeded in gaining independence from China in Nhật Nam in 192 A.D., and used to provoke unrest on our country’s border. This kingdom occupies an important position on the trans-Asian sea route coveted by the envious (Manguin 1979: 269). The capture of Champa can be considered a major success in the control of the East Sea and passing ships (Manguin 1981: 259). Today, it’s still a burning issue that attracts the attention of world powers.
The Great Yue (Đai Việt) was a country that had just had its first king when it was caught in a pincer movement between China and Champa. These two countries initially acted in concert to destroy our country. Considered a warrior king and a strategic visionary, King Lê Đại Hành (or Lê Hoàn) had both of these advantages. He succeeded in defeating Hầu Nhân Bảo‘s Song army in 981 at Chi Lăng (Lạng Sơn) and in punishing Champa during an expedition mounted within a year to drive the Chams out of Amaravati province (Quảng Ngãi) after their clumsy king Bề Mi Thuế had imprisoned Đại Việt’s messengers, Từ Mục and Ngô Tử Canh sent to Champa in an attempt to smooth over disagreements. He destroyed the capital Indrapura (Quảng Nam) and the shrine in 982 and killed its king Paramec Varavarman (Bề Mi Thuế).
He then handed over control of operations in the capital Indrapura and northern Linyi to his subordinate Lưu Kế Tông before returning to his capital. Through this disguised power of attorney, we can see more or less clearly Lê Đại Hành’s intentions to expand the territory, but he was afraid of perhaps receiving reprimand from the Song dynasty at this time. That’s why he didn’t want to reveal them.
According to “Les Mémoires historiques du Grand Viet au complet (Đại Việt Sử Ký Toàn Thư)”, Lưu Kế Tông went into hiding in Champa. That’s why King Lê Đại Hành had to send his unnamed adopted son to capture and kill him in the year 983. But in Song history, it’s worth noting that Lưu Kế Tông became king of Champa three years later, from 986 to 989, and he even sent an ambassador to the Song dynasty to ask the latter to recognize him as ruler of Champa. This shows that there is something at odds with what has been written in our history. It can be explained that Lưu Kế Tông was initially tasked with fulfilling a mission that King Lê Đại Hành had entrusted to him. As Lưu Kế Tông managed to gain fairly strong local support, he attempted to pose as king and gave up honoring his mission.
But thanks to the restoration of the Cham people’s growing military strength in Vijaya (Chà Bàn, Bịnh Định), King Harivarman II succeeded in defeating Lưu Kế Tông, then retaking the whole province of Amaravati and once again settling in the capital Indrapura. As for Lưu Kế Tông, according to French researcher Georges Cœdès, he had passed away. He is no longer mentioned in history. Despite intensified looting along the northern frontier, Champa was now under constant and increasing pressure from our Annam. According to the scholar Trần Trọng Kim’s “History of Vietnam”, China always granted our king the title “Prince of Jiaozhi Province (Giao Chỉ quận vương)” because it continued to regard our country, Jiaozhi (or Giao Chỉ) as a Chinese province at the time of its rule. It was only under King Lý Anh Tôn that our king officially received the title of King of Annam. Since then, our country has been called Annam.
Under the Lý dynasty, on the pretext that Champa had not paid tribute to the Annam kingdom for 16 years, King Lý Thái Tông was forced to go and fight Champa in 1044. The Chams suffered many casualties. Cham general Quách Gia Di decided to slash his king Sạ Đẩu (Jaya Simhavarman II), the last king of Champa’s Indrapura dynasty, and cut off his head to demand surrender. In 1069, based on the reason of not honoring the payment of tribute by Champa for 4 years, King Lý Thánh Tông decided to personally take 100,000 soldiers to fight Champa, succeeded in capturing Chế Củ (or Jaya Rudravarman III) in Cambodia where he sought refuge at that time and brought him back to the capital Thăng Long. To redeem his freedom and return to his homeland, Chế Củ offered in exchange the three northern provinces of Champa roughly equivalent to two provinces of Quảng Binh and Quảng Tri (Georges Cœdès: 248).
It can be said that from this transaction, Đại Viêt began to expand to new lands and encouraged people to live there under the reign of King Lý Nhân Tôn after Lý Giác‘s revolt in the Nghệ An region. On the advice of this rebel, King Chế Ma Na (Jaya Indravarman II) attempted to retake the three exchanged provinces, but was subsequently defeated by the famous general Lý Thường Kiệt, and this time had to definitively retrocede these three retaken provinces.
According to scholar Henri Maspero, during the reign of Lý Thần Tông, our country was invaded by the warrior king Sûryavarman II of Chenla (Chân Lạp). The latter used to often drag Champa into war by constantly inciting or coercing it against our country in the Nghệ An and Thanh Hóa regions. Then, as the two countries became hostile, there was a war lasting almost a hundred years. This was to weaken them in the face of the Annam country, which became powerful at the beginning of the 13th century with a new dynasty, the Trần dynasty. It was also a time when the entire Eurasian region was being invaded by the Mongols. But it was also a time when neighboring Annam and Champa enjoyed good relations, and Champa regained peace and stability under King Indravarman V (1265-1285).
It was thanks to this rapprochement that the Vietnamese and the Chams, united in the same struggle and acting together against a common enemy, the Yuan empire of Kubilai Khan (Đế Chế nhà Nguyên của Hốt Tất Liệt), together achieved military feats of great historical significance not only for our people but also for Southeast Asia. Thanks to this union, the two peoples defeated the Mongol empire. In order to strengthen the hitherto non-existent good understanding between the two peoples, King Trần Nhân Tông visited the Kingdom of Champa for nine months as spiritual leader of the Đại Việt Zen sect on May 11, 1301.
Thanks to this visit, he promised to grant the hand of his daughter, Princess Huyền Trân (Jet Pearl), to King Chế Mân (Jaya Simhavarman III), even though Huyền Trân was only 14 and Chế Mân was quite old. Despite his monk’s cassock, he was still the king-father of the Đại Việt kingdom. He therefore always had a long-term vision for the country and had realized that the Đại Việt kingdom needed territory as a rear base in case of need in the south when he was well aware of the malevolent intentions of the Northerners and he managed to win the war of resistance against the Yuan army twice (1285 and 1287-1288). On the contrary, why did the hero of the Cham people, Chế Mân (Jaya Simhavarman III), cede the two Ô-Lý districts at this time to become a traitor to his people? Is Champa too disadvantaged and Đại Việt too advantageous in this transaction, isn’t it?
It was perhaps because of the aridity of the ceded area that Chế Mân felt it was impossible for him to control it, as Quảng Trị was an area of sandy soil and Thừa Thiên Huế surrounded by hills was also a region devoid of any significant plain (Hồ Trung Tú:283). Moreover, it was a matter of legalizing a territory that Champa no longer had the capacity to govern since Chế Củ (or Jaya Rudravarman III) had ceded it in exchange for his release 236 years ago. The fact that Princess Perle de Jais (Huyền Trân) married Chế Mân five years later (1306) with the dowry of two thousand square meters of the Ô and Lý districts (today’s Quảng Trị and Thừa Thiên Huế provinces) should be a well-considered political calculation with the aim of perpetuating peace and carrying the strategic character for both Đai Việt and Champa dynasties. Thanks to this marriage, Đai Việt’s territory had extended as far north as the Thu Bồn River, and Champa could preserve the remaining territory for future generations.
In the eyes of the people, Princess Huyền Trân is a woman deeply admired in the minds of several generations of Vietnamese, and she is evoked repeatedly in this long march south through her history and destiny. After a year of marriage, King Chế Mân died in 1307. Only the latter and Trúc Lâm đại sĩ (the nickname given to king-father Trần Nhân Tông) managed to know just why, but they had both died within a year of each other. Since then, this wedding gift became a bone of contention between the two countries, leading to continuous wars in which Đai Việt was always the country with the most victories.
Thanks to demographic pressure and immigration policy under the Hồ dynasty, the territories ceded by Champa had become independent, autonomous regions thanks to the Vietnamese village organization (the king’s authority stops in front of the village bamboo hedges). This made it more difficult for Champa to reclaim these territories in the future. Once again, after the 14th century, Champa became a major military power, engaging in battles as far afield as Thanh Hóa. This was the time of the appearance of a character described in the history of the Ming dynasty as Ngo-ta-ngo-tcho, but in the history of the Cham people he became known as Binasuor (or Chế Bồng Nga). Having taken advantage of the weakening of the Trần dynasty and at the same time received the title of King of Champa from the Ming dynasty in China, Chế Bồng Nga attacked North Vietnam 5 times in succession during the period from 1361 to 1390, but 4 times he took his troops directly to the capital Thăng Long.
Due to the treachery of one of Chế Bồng Nga’s subordinates, named Ba-lậu-kê, general Trần Khắc Chân of the Trần dynasty managed to spot the junk carrying Chế Bồng Nga and asked his soldiers to fire on it. Chế Bồng Nga was hit head-on. According to G. Maspero, Chế Bồng Nga’s period was at its peak, but according to G. Cœdès, this sentence is completely incorrect, but Chế Bồng Nga’s military victories should be compared with the blue light at sunset (Ngô Văn Doanh: 126 or G. Cœdès: 405).
A Cham general with the Vietnamese name La Khải, whom the Chams recorded as Jaya Simhavarman in their history, ascended the throne after eliminating the children of Chế Bồng Nga. La Khải decided to abandon all Cham territories north of the Hải Vân Pass (the present-day provinces of Quảng Bình, Quảng Trị and Thừa Thiên Huế).
To avoid another war with the Đai Việt, he ceded Champa’s province of Indrapura in 1402, corresponding to the present-day province of Quảng Nam, where the Mỹ Sơn shrine was located, but reclaimed it later in 1407 when the Ming took the pretext of eliminating the Hồ dynasty for the usurpation of the Trần throne. These Ming thus annexed Annam, sought out all men of talent and virtue and brought them back to China for employment. These included the young Nguyễn An (Ruan An), who later became a Vietnamese eunuch architect responsible for building the Forbidden City in Beijing according to the theory of Yin and Yang and the 5 elements, and Nguyễn Phi Khanh, father of Nguyễn Trãi. After ten years of resistance against the Ming army, Lê Lợi ascended the throne in 1428 and founded the later Lê dynasty. He re-established peaceful relations with the Ming and Champa, whose king was the son of La Khải, named Virabhadravarman and known in Vietnamese chronicles as Ba Dich Lai (Indravarman VI).
According to George Cœdès, Champa rapidly fell into a state of political recession at the end of this dynasty, with up to five successive kings in 30 years due to civil wars for power. At that time, in Annam, there was a great king known as Lê Thánh Tôn, renowned for the literary and martial arts in the history of Việt Nam. It was he who asked the historian Ngô Sĩ Liên to compile all the information relating all the historical events into a collection of articles known as “Đại Việt sử ký (The Historical Memoirs of the Great Viet)”. He ordered his subordinate to trace the geographical map of our country, but secretly sent someone to Champa at the same time to draw a map of Champa with all the strategic nooks and crannies, which enabled his army to take the capital Đồ Bàn (Vijaya) from Chà Bàn (Bình Định) in the year 1471 and capture King Trà Toàn (Maha Sajan) brought back to Đại Việt with 30000 prisoners.
The capture of the Vijaya capital could be compared to the fall of Constantinople (1453) at the same time by the Turks (Nepote 1993:12). After this, the Ming emperor sent an emissary to ask him to return the territory of Binh Định to Champa. But faced with his categorical refusal, the Ming emperor had to give up all action, as our country’s prestige was great in view of the tributes paid by neighboring countries such as Laos (Ai Lao) and the Mường of the West. Champa had now shrunk to just the territories south of Cape Varella (Đại Lãnh, Phú Yên) and no longer posed major obstacles to the southward advance of the Vietnamese people.
As for the Chams, they were dispersed into numerous groups and evacuated by sea and land: one group fled to Cambodia and was sheltered by the Cambodian king Jayajettha III (Ang Sur) in Oudong, Chrui Changvar and Prêk Pra near the capital Phnom Penh and in the province of Kompong Cham, another group went as far as the island of Hainan (Thurgood 1999: 227) and Malacca, and the remaining population had to hide in the Panduranga region still belonging to Champa or accepted to live with the Vietnamese in the annexed territory.
By now, Vietnamese and Cham villages had been established side by side for several hundred years. Nor was it known who was really assimilated when there was the clash and peaceful cultural exchange between humanity’s two great civilizations, India and China. How many times has human history demonstrated that a superior civilization has a transformative effect on an inferior one? The more powerful ancient Rome, at the time of its conquest, was under the influence of Greek civilization. Similarly, when the Mongols or Manchus conquered China, they were assimilated by the latter.
Our Đại Việt kingdom was no exception either. Being accustomed to denigrating and despising the Chams (or Mans), could our Đại Việt have had anything to do with this conquest? He received many things, including many elements from Champa found in royal music such as the Chiêm Thành Âm (Champa Resonances) or the well-cooked rice-plated tambourine (trống cơm)(Thái Văn Kiểm 1964: 65) or later with the “Danses du Sud (Airs des Méridionaux)” through the endless painful laments of the Cham people such as Hà Giang Nam (Descent to the South of the River), Ai Giang Nam (Lamentation of the South of the River), Nam Thương (Compassion of the South) etc. and in sculptural art under both the Lý and Trần dynasties.
There was a time when the Vietnamese lived under the southern influence of the South to create artifacts such as the head of a Lý-Trần dynasty dragon resembling that of a Makara dragon or the Siamese duck (vịt siêm) to the Hamsa goose of Champa for example, all found in the imperial citadel Thăng Long on tile roofs and building gables right down to the decorated motifs on bowls (Hồ Trung Tú: 264).
As for the Chams, they weren’t completely assimilated right away, as they were abandoning their language to speak Vietnamese in their homeland. Henceforth, they were to have a surname like the Vietnamese under King Minh Mạng. The names they had had in their history were the surnames of kings or those of the royal family according to author Phú Trạm in the newspaper Tia Sáng (October 2, 2006). They used Ja (man) or Mu (woman) They also created an accent tone for themselves that hadn’t existed before, by speaking the Vietnamese language with the intonation of a native Cham. They spoke, they listened, they corrected themselves, they understood each other with the Vietnamese community on the spot to produce a distinct accent tone that no longer resembled the original tone (Quảng Nam’s intonation for example) when they had contact with the Vietnamese people before (as their Vietnamese wife and children) or when they were appointed notables in territories belonging to the Đai Việt kingdom. They didn’t necessarily lose their roots immediately, as they still retained the habits and customs of the Cham people.
More specifically, in regions such as Đà Nẵng, Hội An, we continued to see people still wearing Cham clothing at the end of the 18th century through the photographs of Cristoforo Borri or John Barrow. The men wore kama or bottomless pants (the sarong) with a fairly wide turban, and the women long skirts with several multicolored pleats or bare torsos (Hồ Trung Tú: 177).in front of the names like the words văn or Thị among the Vietnamese. When they became old and occupied an important role or rank in society, they were called from then on by that function or title (Hồ Trung Tú: 57).
The Vietnamese who migrated to areas where the Cham population was dense were obliged to adapt and accept the Chams’ way of speaking the Vietnamese language, from Quảng Nam to Phú Yên. As for the territories where the number of Chams was low and that of Vietnamese migrants was high, the intonation practiced in these territories remained that of the Vietnamese migrants. The latter managed to retain their intonation entirely in territories stretching from the Ngang Pass to Huế. They frequently used the dialects of Nghệ An-Hà Tịnh (Hồ Trung Tú:154) or Thanh Hóa later with Lord Nguyễn Hoàng.
As for the cultural characteristics of the Cham people, they have all disappeared since the 9th month of the Year of the Tiger, under the reign of Minh Mạng (1828). This was the time of the royal edict designed to prohibit southern men from wearing kamas. Since the Chams claimed not to know how long ago or when they had a link of Northern origin like hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families cohabiting in this territory, they no longer wondered who they were exactly, because after a few generations they had become “pure Vietnamese” and thus joined their people in the long march to the tip of Cà Mau. From then on, the end of Champa could be announced.
Bibliography
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