Champa

Champa was the seafaring Indianized kingdom of the Vietnamese coast from 192 to 1832, towers of red brick facing the South China Sea. Around 192 Khu Lien, a Han functionary turned rebel, seized Xianglin county and called himself king of Lin-yi: the first Cham state. Sanskrit, Shaivism and the Pallava script sailed in with the monsoon traders, and brick kalan towers rose at My Son, the holy city, and Dong Duong. The Tang called it Huanwang; the Vietnamese, pushing south in their long Nam tien, called it Cham. The sea made Champa rich and vulnerable: its ships raided Hoi An to Java, and in the 1370s Che Bong Nga, the greatest Cham king, stormed Thang Long itself three times and killed a Vietnamese emperor in battle. After his death the tide reversed: the Le emperor Thanh Tong took Vijaya in 1471 and beheaded forty thousand, leaving Champa the southern rump of Panduranga. The Nguyen lords kept it as a buffer, then swallowed it; in 1832 Minh Mang abolished the last Cham prefecture, ending seventeen centuries of the towers' kingdom, whose Cham people still live in the south.