Champa kingdom founded

Around 192 CE a local official named Khu Lien (the name as given in Chinese records) killed the Han magistrate in Rinan, the southernmost Han commandery on the coast of what is now central Vietnam, and proclaimed himself king. Chinese sources call the new state Linyi. It is generally seen as the first kingdom of the Cham people, who spoke an Austronesian language related to Malay and who had lived along the coast for centuries.¹

The timing came as Han authority was cracking at the end of the second century. Cham ports sat on the main sea route between India and China, so merchants, Hindu and Buddhist priests, Sanskrit writing and Indian ideas of kingship arrived along with goods. Champa was not one unified state but a loose set of coastal principalities, such as Amaravati, Vijaya and Panduranga, that rose and fell in importance over a thousand years. It raided and traded with its neighbors, fought China and the Khmer, and built brick temples at My Son, which flourished from about the fourth to the thirteenth centuries.¹²⁴

Champa's fortunes turned when Dai Viet, pushing south from the Red River, sacked the main Cham capital Vijaya in 1471. Small Cham states survived in the south until Vietnam annexed the last of them in the 1830s. Today the Cham are a minority in Vietnam and Cambodia, many of them Muslim, and the My Son temples are a World Heritage site.¹²