The Ancient Champa in New York

From April 14 to July 27, 2014 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a great exhibition was held dedicated to the Hindu and Buddhist sculptures of the "Lost Kingdoms" of the former South East Asia.

Called "Lost Kingdoms, Hindu Buddhist sculptures of Early South-East Asia, Fifth to Eighth Century", the exhibition presented 170 beautiful works from six countries of the Peninsula and from seven Western museums. The "Kingdoms" shown here fall within the Pyu, Founan, Chen Là, Champa, Dvaravati and Sri Vijaya cultures intending to introduce "a string of emerging states", as T.P. Campbell, the Director of the Museum wrote. Twenty-one researchers have contributed to the redaction of this impressive catalogue.

Champa was represented by a dozen museum pieces, all well known, mostly loaned by the Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture, the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum, and the Guimet Museum in Paris.

Regarding the catalogue, in addition to the reference to ancient Champa by John Guy, the exhibition's curator, we owe a short chapter to Pierre Baptiste called "Early Cham Art: Indigenous Regional Styles and Connections" (p. 69-73), in which the author, after speculating about the dating of the Vo Kanh inscription, presents what is known about the settlement of Cham in the littoral land of central Vietnam, as well as their territorial structure and the emergence of cultural influences from India and China around the sixth or seventh centuries. He speculates about the Gupta influence and questions the meaning and the dating of the divinity under the five-headed Naga found in group G of My Son at the beginning of the last century. On one hand, he connects this artefact with archaic beliefs and with Chinese Annals of the Liang dynasty on the other.

He then alludes to the kingdoms of the seventh and early eighth centuries (most notably those mentioned in the inscriptions), as well as the relationships with the Khmer and the influence of the Pallava tradition in South India. Then he emphasises the importance, to the history of iconography, of the standing Ganesha found in My Son E 5, and of the tympanum My Son C 1 (eighth century) representing Siva dancing surrounded by several figures.

However, the point the author makes here about the discovery, in 2006, of a sanctuary foundation stele in Hoa Lai (Ninh Thuan province), most likely extends a little more of our knowledge about Champa. This stele, dating to 778 AD, was deciphered and published in 2011 by Arlo Griffiths and William A. Southworth (The Asian Journal, Paris) and "(might allow) a better understanding of the connections between Cham art and Central Java art ».

Such discovery shows that the scope of knowledge of the ancient Champa can only be growing.

J-M Beurdeley & E. Guillon, November 2014