The Champa kingdom was a Vietnamese historic civilization that has existed since ~1000 B.C., and became a major kingdom in what is now Southern Vietnam in 192 A.D. The Cham people are an important ethnic group in Southeast Asia, yet their visibility in Vietnamese history is nearly nonexistent outside of the scholarly community and those that are from Vietnam or that are Cham.
The Cham are believed to be of Austronesian descent, and in Vietnam were a group that were native to the Southern coasts of the nation. As a state, it remained independent from the Northern Vietnamese state for centuries, and developed its own cultural practices through interaction with Indian, Malay, and Cambodian groups led to the Cham's adoption of Hinduism, amongst other practices like writing in Sanskrit script.
The Le Dynasty conquered the Champa kingdom in the 1400's, though it would not be formally annexed until the 1800's. The incorporation of Champa into Vietnam has definitely left some impact on the ethnic makeup and integration of cultural practices in Southern and Central Vietnam, and I hope that I'd be able to learn more about them in another project - possibly if I could travel to Vietnam!
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