EARLY VIETNAM AND THE KHMER EMPIRE
The first kingdoms in Indochina (the region now occupied by Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) were based more on international trade than on agriculture. In time, the rich agricultural base of the Mekong River Valley in the Cambodian lowlands and the Red River Valley in northern Vietnam came to support more powerful states.
The Vietnamese in the Red River Valley centered on a settlement near the present site of Hanoi on the northern edge of the Red River Delta. To the south were the kingdoms the Chinese called Linyi, in central Vietnam, and Funan, in southern Vietnam and Cambodia. Chinese records show all three kingdoms well established by the third century CE, but Funan was the most prosperous of them.
THE CHINESE INVASION
Vietnam was conquered by a southern Chinese ruler in the third century BCE, and again by the Chinese Han dynasty in the second century BCE. Early Chinese political interest in Vietnam was a consequence of the Han rulers’ desire to secure southern trade routes and to gain access to luxury goods from the south, including pearls, incense, drugs, elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell, coral, parrots, kingfishers, peacocks, and other rare treasures to satisfy the demands of the Chinese aristocracy. Under Chinese rule, Vietnam’s Lac elite was allowed to rule in traditional ways, although the social system was modified to suit Chinese patterns. The Chinese found some Lac practices inconsistent with Chinese traditions, notably their disregard for a Chinese-style patriarchal system and their preference for bilateral kinship patterns (where the child is equally related to its mother’s and father’s kin).
In 39 CE, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi (both died 42 or 43 CE), daughters of a Lac lord, led an uprising against the Han and drove Han authority out of northern Vietnam and parts of southern China. The Han general Ma Yuan (14 BCE–49 CE) captured and beheaded the Trung Sisters in 42 or 43 CE. The rebellion was the final attempt of the pre-Han Vietnamese ruling class to resist Chinese authority, and subsequently Han authority over Vietnam became more direct.
In the subsequent Han-Vietnamese culture, status derived from wealth and the private ownership of land. Great families lived in fortresslike compounds and supported a private community of "guests" that included scholars, technical experts, spies, assassins, and private armies. When the Han dynasty in China fell in the third century CE, the Han-Vietnamese elite took greater interest in seaborne trade as a secondary source of income. Commerce in luxury goods was a major preoccupation of local administrators.
The coast in general became an international emporium during this period, notably in the kingdoms of Linyi and Funan but also in a Vietnamese port in the vicinity of modern Hanoi. By the fourth century CE, the rulers of Funan and Linyi proclaimed themselves kings in the Indian Hindu tradition, while the Vietnamese north, in common with post-Han Chinese society, found the Buddhist tradition appealing in this era of dynastic transition.
FUNAN
At the beginning of the first century CE, ports on what are now the southern Vietnamese coast, in Cambodia, Thailand, and on the Malay Peninsula were under the authority of a Hindu state the Chinese called Funan (Funan left no written records and the local name for the kingdom is unknown). These ports had developed to service the growing numbers of merchants traveling the sea route from India to China and had facilities, including buildings for storing goods and hostelries for merchants who stayed there until the next season’s monsoon winds allowed their return voyage. A water management system that drained portions of the adjacent upper Mekong Delta allowed Funan’s farmers to produce multiple rice harvests annually, supplying sufficient surplus to easily feed foreign merchants resident in Funan’s ports and to provision their ships.
By the fourth century CE, significant changes were taking place in international trade routes that had a profound impact on Funan. In the second half of the fourth century CE, China no longer had access to the central Asian caravan routes and was forced to turn its attention to the maritime route. Southeast Asian trade centers beyond the Malay Peninsula responded to Chinese initiatives. The Funan Mekong Delta domain declined as the centers of the Cham civilization on the Vietnam coast north of the Mekong Delta, as well as the Khmer civilization in Cambodia and eastern Thailand, became the new focal points for civilization in the Indochina region.
CHAMPA
The Chams developed a Hindu-Buddhist river-based civilization south of their Vietnamese neighbors, who were centered in the Red River Valley. Champa, the Cham state, incorporated the earlier Linyi and Funan ports and their populations. Farther west, the Khmers built a great agrarian civilization that eventually centered on Angkor.
Both these successor civilizations traced their lineage to Funan and rooted their evolving states on the Indianized patterns of statecraft initially developed by Funan’s rulers. By the eighth century CE, the Hindu-Buddhist Champa state had evolved based on wet-rice economy and participation in international trade. Champa had a strategic position relative to maritime routes to and from China from regions to its south (Java and Thailand), north (Japan), and east (the Philippines). The Cham monarchs established a maritime police force, which in times of political instability would readily turn to piracy as their principal means of support.
Cham civilization was multicentered. Some Chams lived on a narrow, sandy coastland in scattered agricultural settlements that were punctuated by numerous short streams that connected the coast with the mountainous interior. In other places, coastal ports had links with productive wet-rice-producing river valleys upstream, which provided access to the western highland regions that supplied a variety of valuable forest products in high demand among international traders. The most prominent Cham ritual and temple centers were at Po Nagar, in the southern coastal strip then known as Kauthara, and Myson, in the north central Amaravati region upstream from the coastal port now known as Hoi An. In the late fourteenth century, the Cham court developed a particularly favorable relationship with the new Ming dynasty in China at the expense of its Vietnamese neighbors. When the Vietnamese ruler Le Loi (reigned 1428–1432) ended 15 years of Ming occupation in 1428, he and his successors made a point of renewing raids on Champa and also depriving the Chams of their ambitions to populate and annex the fertile Vietnamese southern frontier.
THE LY, TRAN, AND LE DYNASTIES
The Vietnamese enjoyed partial freedom from Chinese rule from the third century CE until the rise of the Tang dynasty nearly five centuries later. After the end of the Tang dynasty in the tenth century CE, the Vietnamese regained and maintained their independence despite repeated Chinese efforts to reconquer them. Dinh Bo Lin (died 979) came to power in the 960s and established an independent Vietnamese state, called Dai Viet, with its capital, Hoa Lu, in the hills at the southern edge of the Red River Delta. In 1009, the commander of the palace guard made himself emperor, founding the Ly dynasty and, in the following year, the capital was moved to the site of modern Hanoi, then called Thang Long, on the northern edge of the delta. Ly Phat Ma (reigned 1028–1054) established a code of law based on combining Vietnamese and Chinese legal traditions. He increased the monarch’s powers, which were rooted in his court’s patronage of and partnership with Buddhist religious leaders.
In the early thirteenth century, the Tran family founded a dynasty, which eventually replaced previous Buddhist court advisers with newly trained Confucian bureaucrats recruited from the secular aristocracy. The Tran dynasty repelled Mongol attempts to reassert Chinese rule over Vietnam. Three times the Mongols captured Hanoi, and three times the Vietnamese were able to drive them out. The Tran dynasty was ended by a Chinese invasion in 1407. China then ruled Vietnam for the next twenty years before being defeated by armies headed by a Vietnamese aristocrat, Le Loi (dates unknown), who founded the Le dynasty. Under the Le emperors, the Vietnamese began the long southward advance against their Cham neighbors, who they finally defeated in 1471.
THE RISE OF THE KHMER EMPIRE
To the west of Vietnam, the Khmer monarch Jayavarman II (reigned 802–834 CE) linked the various regional centers of Khmer settlement in modern-day Cambodia into a powerful kingdom. To help achieve a sense of unity, Jayavarman employed new sacred Indian vocabulary to proclaim his glory and abilities. After Jayavarman’s reign, succession disputes ended with the victor reaffirming ties to Jayavarman, the devaraja (literally, the "divine king"), thus making an ancestral claim to lead the Khmer people. To proclaim their legitimacy, Jayavarman II and subsequent Khmer monarchs merged local Khmer cultural practices with the worship of Indian deities such as Shiva and Vishnu, as well as the Buddha. The devaraja cult and later Khmer royal cults that were initiated in its image all exalted but did not deify the reigning monarch. At their deaths, however, Khmer monarchs became divine, and thereafter the living might draw upon their superhuman powers.
ANGKOR
The Khmer king Yasovarman I (reigned 889–900 CE) began to build a new capital at Angkor to legitimize his claim to divine kingship as a manifestation of the god Shiva. The plan of the city reflected the structure of the world according to Hindu cosmology—a mandala, a magically contained space. It was surrounded by a wall and a moat, as the universe was thought to be encircled by rock and ocean. In the exact middle of the city, on an artificial mound, stood a pyramidal temple representing the sacred Mount Meru in the high Himalayas, where Shiva was said to be perpetually meditating for the eternal maintenance of the cosmic order. Numerous other temples were grouped on and around the mound, which was regarded as the center of the universe. The king declared himself "ruler of the universe." This title, together with other symbols, titles, and attendant rituals, was inherited by successive Khmer kings.
The final and complete form of Hindu Angkor was constructed at the beginning of the twelfth century at Angkor Wat (wat means "temple") by the reforming Khmer monarch Suryavarman II (died 1150). Following the desecration of Angkor Wat by invaders from Champa in 1175, Jayavarman VII (reigned 1181–1218) constructed a spectacular new Mahayana Buddhist temple complex adjacent to the royal city at neighboring Angkor Thom. While new Buddhist elements were added, worship of earlier Hindu deities remained, and the Khmers seem to have accepted both religious traditions and their symbols. Instability after Jayavarman’s assertive rule, the continuing threat of another Cham attack, and the subsequent financial drain of state revenues to maintain the army and to rebuild the state’s infrastructure all contributed to the decline and conquest of the Khmer Empire only a few decades later. Both ritual sites were largely abandoned after a Thai invasion in 1431.
The Angkor-based royal network depended heavily on the ritual and economic links of local ancestral temples, maintained by the elite under royal license, to the magnificent royal temple complexes at Angkor. This system remained intact until Angkor was abandoned after the 1431 Thai invasion, when the Thai victors carried back the Khmer symbols of office and Angkor’s most significant statuary to their capital, to invest Thai monarchs as the rightful heirs to the Angkor legacy. In 1434, the Khmer capital was moved to Phnom Penh on the lower Mekong, and the Khmer Empire never recovered its former power.
K. HALL
