The Cham people

Come back down from the mountains, follow Vietnam's central coast, where the sand is golden and the sun fierce. Suddenly, atop a hill or at the edge of a valley, rise towers of red brick weathered by the centuries, slender against the sky, covered in carvings of dancers, gods and stone flowers. These are neither pagodas nor Chinese temples: they are Hindu sanctuaries, remnants of a forgotten kingdom. Welcome to the world of the Chăm (say "cham"), heirs of Champa.

Heirs of a kingdom

The Chăm (or Cham) are the descendants of the Kingdom of Champa (Chăm Pa), a powerful civilization that reigned for more than a thousand years over the center of present-day Vietnam, roughly from the coast of Đà Nẵng southward. This was no people of the margins, but a brilliant maritime state: sailors, merchants, builders, turned toward the sea and toward India more than toward China.

Champa traded across the whole Indian Ocean and the Malay world; its ports saw the passage of spices, precious woods, ivory and ceramics. From India the Chăm received an immense influence: Hinduism, a script of Indian origin, the art of temple-building, the Sanskrit of inscriptions. Over the centuries, pressed by the Kinh expansion southward (the famous Nam tiến, the "march to the south"), the kingdom retreated and finally faded. But its people, its language and its faith survived.

Today the Chăm live mainly in the south-central provinces such as Ninh Thuận and Bình Thuận, as well as in the Mekong Delta and into neighboring Cambodia. They are one of the few peoples of Vietnam to carry the living memory of a vanished ancient kingdom.

A language from elsewhere

The Chăm language (tiếng Chăm) belongs to the Austronesian family — the same vast family as Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog of the Philippines, or Malagasy of Madagascar. This is a striking singularity: amid peoples speaking Austroasiatic (Kinh), Tai (Tày) or Hmong-Mien (H'Mông) languages, the Chăm speak a language cousin to those of the great archipelagos of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Their language alone recalls their past as navigators.

The Chăm also have a script of their own, derived from Indian (Brahmic-type) writing, with round, flowing letters very different from the Latin alphabet of Vietnamese. Ancient inscriptions, carved in stone in Chăm and in Sanskrit, have allowed scholars to reconstruct the history of Champa. Few peoples in Vietnam possess a written tradition so old and so distinct.

Believers twice over: Hindu and Bani

A rare and fascinating fact: the religion of the Chăm is dual. Divided by history, they fall today into two great traditions.

• The Chăm Balamon (from "Brahmin") carry on a local form of Hinduism inherited from Champa: the cult of Shiva above all, Indian deities reinterpreted, and the veneration of deified royal figures. Their priests, the temple-towers and the great ceremonies keep alive this religiosity that came from India more than a millennium ago.
• The Chăm Bani practice an ancient and very particular form of Islam, adapted to Chăm soil and blended with local customs — distinct from the more orthodox Islam practiced by some of the southern Chăm.

This coexistence of Hinduism and Islam within a single people is unique in Vietnam. It tells of centuries of exchange, first with India and then with the Muslim merchant world of the Indian Ocean.

The brick towers, prayers in terracotta

The greatest visible legacy of the Chăm is their temple-towers (tháp Chăm, thap-cham), sanctuaries of red brick rising toward the sky. Two names resonate above all others:

• Mỹ Sơn (mee-suhn), a sacred valley nestled among the hills, once a great religious center of Champa, where a whole complex of towers and temples survives — a UNESCO World Heritage site.
• Po Nagar (po-nagar), the sanctuary overlooking the city of Nha Trang, dedicated to a great mother goddess of the Chăm land, still a living place of worship.

These towers astonish through a technical feat: they are built of bricks set so tightly that the joints are barely visible, as if the wall were a single block. Exactly how the Chăm bonded and "welded" their bricks remains partly a mystery to archaeologists, which has only added to their aura. Each tower (kalan) sheltered a deity and a linga, symbol of Shiva; the entrance faces east, toward the rising sun.

The art of stone and dance

Around and upon these temples, the Chăm deployed a sculpture of rare elegance: sandstone and brick are covered with celestial dancers (apsara), gods, lions, makaras (aquatic monsters), breasts and hips carved with a wholly Indian sensuality. These works, many of them gathered in the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Đà Nẵng, are among the finest testimonies of Southeast Asian art.

From this art is also born the apsara dance, the dance of the celestial nymphs: undulating arms, hands with curved fingers, poses drawn directly from the figures carved in stone. Even today, at the great Chăm festivals, dancers in traditional costume bring these age-old gestures back to life, accompanied by drums and the reed oboe.

Festivals, weaving and Chăm life today

The great festival of the Chăm Balamon is Katé (ka-teh), celebrated in autumn: people climb the temple-towers, offer the deities and the departed kings food, cloth and prayers, dance, play music, and share the feast among the villages. It is the moment when the memory of Champa becomes present and joyful again.

The Chăm are also excellent artisans. Their weaving is renowned: in villages such as Mỹ Nghiệp, women weave on the loom cloth of colorful geometric patterns, brocades and wraps worn at ceremonies. Their ancestral pottery is also famous, shaped by hand without a wheel, the potter walking around the piece rather than turning it — a craft of rare antiquity.

Today the Chăm are a relatively modest minority in number, but immense in heritage. They keep their language, their scripts, their religions, their festivals and their crafts, between the red towers of the past and the village life of the present.

Chăm traces in today's Vietnam

The imprint of Champa is not limited to the Chăm themselves: it quietly runs through the whole culture of central Vietnam. Many place names, rhythms, flavors and cults of the central coast keep a Chăm coloring. Kinh farmers settled on former Champa lands sometimes took up local deities as their own: thus the goddess Thiên Y A Na (thyen-ee-a-na), venerated at Po Nagar, is a figure in whom the Chăm goddess and a Vietnamese mother goddess are superimposed. The past was not erased; it was absorbed, reinterpreted, prolonged.

You also meet the Chăm inheritance in certain practical skills: the mastery of irrigation in a dry climate, the building of water reservoirs, the art of growing crops in the arid soil of the south-central coast. Where little rain falls, around Phan Rang, the Chăm long ago tamed the drought, growing grapes and fruit and watching over the smallest thread of water.

A people standing tall

One must guard against a purely nostalgic gaze. The Chăm are not a museum-people: they are very much living families, active villages, young people learning their language and script alongside Vietnamese, artisans selling their brocades, worshippers who climb the towers for Katé every year. Champa fell centuries ago, but to be Chăm today is to carry a double belonging with pride: citizens of modern Vietnam and heirs of an old kingdom of the Indian Ocean.

A kingdom in memory

To walk at sunset among the towers of Mỹ Sơn, when the brick glows red and the stone nymphs seem to stir in the shadow, is to grasp something essential: Vietnam was not always a single country of a single culture. It was also the ground of a kingdom turned toward India and the sea, whose living heirs, the Chăm, still tend the flame. To know them is to add to the Vietnamese mosaic a color one did not expect: that of Hindu gods, round letters, and towers rising toward the rising sun.

Vietnamese to remember

• Chăm (cham) — the people who are heirs of the Champa kingdom
• Chăm Pa (cham-pa) — Champa, the ancient kingdom of central Vietnam
• tháp Chăm (thap-cham) — the Chăm red-brick temple-towers
• Mỹ Sơn (mee-suhn) — the sacred valley, a UNESCO site
• Po Nagar (po-nagar) — the great mother-goddess sanctuary at Nha Trang
• Chăm Balamon (cham-balamon) — the Hindu, "Brahmanist" Chăm
• Chăm Bani (cham-bani) — the Chăm of the local Muslim tradition
• Katé (ka-teh) — the great autumn festival of the Chăm Balamon
• apsara (apsara) — the celestial dance and the carved nymphs
• linga (linga) — the symbol of Shiva sheltered in the towers
• Ninh Thuận (ninh-thwan) — the heartland province of the Chăm today
• gạch (gak) — brick, the material of the thousand-year-old towers