Cham

The Cham are an Austronesian seafaring people of the central Vietnamese coast, heirs of the Sa Huỳnh culture whose river-mouth settlements reach back to around the first millennium BCE. From the second century CE they built Champa, a league of Indianized port principalities which grew wealthy on the trade routes linking India and China and reached their height in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Hinduism shaped Cham art and its red-brick sanctuaries such as Mỹ Sơn. Contacts with Muslim traders from the eleventh century slowly prepared the conversion that made the ruling dynasty Muslim by the seventeenth century.

In 1337 the Cham held the coastal strip between Đại Việt and the Khmer, but the Vietnamese Nam Tiến pressed southward: Lê Thánh Tông sacked Vijaya in 1471, ending Champa's power, while Panduranga survived as a tributary until the Nguyễn emperor Minh Mạng annexed it in 1832. Cham refugees settled in Cambodia and the Mekong Delta, where descendants still speak Cham and keep matrilineal customs.