Vestiges of an Empire

Thorny bushes now crown the once grand brick towers of the ancient city of My Son. Carved into a crumbling temple wall, a stone warrior brandishes a sword, defying anyone to challenge the powerful Kingdom of Champa.

Unfortunately, over the centuries many people have. Conquered by Vietnamese invaders, plundered by French colonists and bombed by U.S. warplanes, My Son is now abandoned, one of the few vestiges of an empire all but forgotten. When Zheng He’s ships first called on Champa, the powerful Hindu kingdom had dominated central Vietnam for more than 1,000 years. The haven described by the fleet’s Chinese chronicler Ma Huan was the rough port town of Qui Nhon, where sarong-wearing, wiry-haired Cham ivory merchants and slave traders plied their wares. Yet in 1471, less than 70 years later, the northern Annam kingdom of ethnic Vietnamese conquered the Chams, driving them south and scattering them. Some remained Hindu but many in Cambodia and southern Vietnam later converted to Islam en masse, and their ancient culture was nearly forgot-ten. “Do you really mean the Chams once had an empire?” asks an incredulous 69-year-old Tran Dinh Liu, an ethnic Cham Hroi farmer who lives less than an hour from a 12th-century Cham tower near Qui Nhon. “I don’t know any history of the nation except the revolution,” he says, glancing at the communist People’s Committee official who is in attendance.

For years Hanoi — sensitive about any reference to Vietnam’s past divisions — has quietly discouraged teaching the country’s 100,000 ethnic Cham about their lost empire. “It might break down national unity,” says Rosalvy, an ethnic Cham teacher in the southern Vietnamese town of Phum Soai, who like many Muslim Chams goes by only one name. Yet in September the government is holding a Cham festival at the My Son ruins — the first in hundreds of years. Why the change of heart? Desperate to bring revenue and tourists to the country’s neglected central region, and boosted by UNESCO’s granting My Son World Heritage status in 1999, the government has begun to promote the ruins and Cham heritage. According to the head of the Vietnam Folk Culture and Arts Association, Nguyen Hai Lien: “The Cham people want to prove that the culture symbolized in the ruins still exists.”

But in southeastern Ninh Thuan province, home to half the country’s Chams, the heirs of the once proud people are more concerned about preserving their current culture and teaching the precepts of their faith to their children in private religious schools. In Phum Soai, a small cluster of Islam in An Giang province, sarongs, prayer caps and head scarves mingle with the more familiar conical hats and trousers, and people make a living fishing, farming and weaving cloth in traditional Cham patterns. The area has no fewer than 12 mosques, and town elder Ismail has just returned from a cherished journey to Mecca. Ismail has never seen My Son or the other Cham ruins in central and southern Vietnam. He wouldn’t mind seeing them, he says, but what’s important is teaching Cham children religion not ancient history. “The past is the past,” he shrugs. “We don’t teach about that.”