Jean-François Hubert
The Art of Champa
Text: Jean-François Hubert
Translation: Anna Allanet
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© Thérèse Le Prat photograph
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François Devos for all photographs.
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ISBN 978-1-78310-739-1
Acknowledgments
My thanks go first of all to my editor, Jean-Paul Manzo who enthusiastically accepted my project, and to Eliane de Sérésin who had the task of seeing it get done. May they find here the expression of my deep gratitude.
Particular mention is due to François Devos, photographer, who agreed to accompany me to places that were often picturesque, to take magnificent photos.
Thanks also to all those without whom, for one reason or another, this work would not have come into existence:
Sophie Allard-Latour
Philippe Damas
Jean-Luc Enguehard
Michel Inguimberty
Jean-Paul Morin
Cang Nguyen
Eric Pouillot
Richard Prevost
Nicholas Scheeres
Marc Vartabedian
Anna Zweede.
Finally, my very special thanks go to Joëlle Loiret, whose professional eye and sense of form and content are only equalled by her patience and tenacity.
Jean-François Hubert
The Art of Champa
Contents
Introduction
The History of Champa
Cham Architecture
Gods and their representation
Styles and the dating of sculptures
Cyclotron analysis of Champa metals and jewellery
Conclusion
Glossary
Brief Chronology of Champa
Chronology of the reigns of Cham sovereigns, the construction of temples and their schools of sculpture
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
1. Sandstone Garuda in the Thâp-Mam style
(12th Century) standing in front of the
Vietnam History Museum (Hanoi) (detail).
2. Sandstone Garuda in the Thâp-Mam style
(12th Century), standing in front of the
Vietnam History Museum (Hanoi).
Evoking Champa means glorifying death, sanctifying remnants, magnifying clues, singing the praises of mourning, and reconstructing history. Champa only exists now in the memories of a diminishing collection of living people who desire eternal life, in a half-audible melody – necessarily exotic – that is hummed by a few disquieted spirits.
Yet, in defiance of time, held in compassion by it, wreaking revenge on the injustice of the inevitable… Cham statues bear witness to this civilisation that was swallowed up in the meanders of history, profane child of the divine work of destruction.
Civilisations die, but all are fecund. They leave in our collective memory those fundamental notions, impossible to articulate, which are irresolutely infinite and unattainably absolute.
Perhaps, however, the Cham civilisation is a little more lost to us than others: death is not a state of being but a discourse, and Champa has long lacked orators and an audience. Still, what a gesture! A mysterious birth, a stateless ideal, a glorious decadence, a death announced in the name of impossible otherness. Champa is five hundred years of mystery, a thousand of destruction, and three hundred of being forgotten.
The most efficient approach to its rediscovery was to capture its vestiges, its abandoned towers, its forgotten sculptures, its sublime sites where the divine wanders; a pleasant task for the willing traveller, armed with the learned indications of the great ancients and attentive to the unbiased attraction of discovery. Examining a statue, carrying out an authentication, is to interrogate condensed history. All the statues illustrated in this book were closely examined, measured, inspected, and authenticated. All from private collections, often heretofore unpublished, they bring new blood to the observation: in art, nothing is more dangerous than inbred models and limited fields of vision.
Cham art in general and Cham sculpture in particular is profoundly original. It was rediscovered by the French and has now been repossessed by the Vietnamese at the beginning of the twenty- first century.
Profoundly original because even if a few stylistic comparisons can be made, origins referred to, or influences noted, Cham sculpture differs from all other schools of sculpture – past or present.
Rediscovered by the French during the period of French administration in Indochina (which included Vietnam) in the second half of the nineteenth century, its scientists and explorers supported by the government of the day. Explorers, supported by architects, epigraphists and archaeologists not only garnered a unique fund of knowledge, combining documentation and commentary, but also carried out the major work of conserving Cham sites. In a world where the use of French is declining, it is not insignificant to note that French remains the language of reference for the study of Cham art: no precise reference, no serious study could – even today – escape from the detailed examination and attentive reading of documents drawn from the best sources, all written in French, over the last five hundred years.
3. Vo-Canh Inscription Standing in front of
the Vietnam History Museum (Hanoi).
Dated from the 3rd and 4th Century, it remainins
pivotal in much research although its
being of Cham origin is uncertain.
These documents have been repossessed today by the Vietnamese because they have been able, after the demands of years of war, to interest themselves in an art that, for many, remains foreign. After all, in the collective conscience that cements a nation, the Chams were, consciously, the enemy to the south, those who pillaged the north, and who, after Chinese occupation until the tenth century, appeared as the obstacle to an “expansion to the south” (Nam Tien) that the north’s demographic growth rendered inevitable. Subconsciously, the Chams were also a source of guilt for the majority Kinh, having irreversibly destroyed a local culture that was over a thousand years old, reducing a people to assimilation. Roughly 100,000 Chams still live in Vietnam, listed in the inventory of fifty-four minorities in the country, living mainly near Phan Rang and Phan Ri, or near Chau Doc, all in the southern part of modern Vietnam.
The repossession of Cham culture is now flourishing: the care given to new publications, the valorising and restoration of sites, and the efficient archaeological digs, are all indications of a national realisation and of a true will to reclaim Cham heritage which, today, is incontestably Vietnamese.
However, it would be incorrect to inscribe Cham art in general and Cham sculpture in particular in an exclusively Franco- Vietnamese historical relationship or in an isolated national policy. Cham sculpture has long won over an international audience. Certainly, the first museums to exhibit it were founded in Vietnam under French influence. It is essentially the Ecole française d’Extreme-Orient (EFEO) (French School of the Far East) to which the mission to conserve historic monuments in Indochina was conferred, and the creation of the first museums is due. The school’s buildings first housed, as early as 1899 in Saigon, a few stones brought back from the ruins in My Son. Then a few sculptures left for Hanoi between 1900 and 1905 and, little by little, through pieces gathered fortuitously or during organised digs, true museum collections were constituted. The dates of the actual creation of these museums are earlier but we have chosen to list here their definitive installation: the Louis Finot Museum in Hanoi (inaugurated in 1933), the Henri Parmentier Museum (1936) in Tourane-Danang, the Khai Dinh Museum in Hue (1923), the Blanchard de la Brosse Museum in Saigon (1929). Bit by bit foreign museums found it possible to assemble collections of quality, for example, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Brooklyn in the USA, Museum Rietberg in Switzerland, Guimet in Paris, and Labit in Toulouse.
4. Vo-Canh Inscription,
standing in front of the Vietnam
History Museum (Hanoi). (detail).
5. Cham archeological Thâp-Mam digs, 1933.
6. Portrait of Philippe Stern, 1953.
Not only epigraphists, architects, archaeologists, and translators but also hobbyists have provided knowledge of the Cham civilisation, its temples and, in particular, its sculpture. Below, category by category, these illustrious innovators are listed with a brief overview of their contributions.
The first group to recall is that of epigraphists: specialists whose science concerns the study and knowledge of inscriptions. Firstly, it must be noted the following learned men all contributed significantly to the current understanding of this ancient culture. However, there are limitations that this science has in the identification and dating of Cham art:
Auguste Barth (1834-1916), trained as an expert on India and wrote the founding charter of the FEEL in 1901; Georges Maspero (1872-1942), was an administrator in Indochina but is often confused with his brilliant brother, the linguist Henri (1883- 1945); Louis Finot (1864-1935), archivist and palaeographer, Sanskrit expert, and director of the EFEO; Paul Pelliot (1878- 1945); Henri Parmentier (1871-1949); Georges Coedes (1886- 1969), who published his first article on epigraphy in the EFEO bulletin at the age of eighteen in 1904, and who had perfect mastery, in addition to Cham, of Sanskrit and Khmer among other languages; Paul Mus (1909-1960), an expert on India, specialist on the spread of Hinduism throughout India and South-East Asia, and who was interested above all in the natural, and beneficial, confrontation of Hindu and indigenous elements in the elaboration of the Cham religion.
Unfortunately, all the work of collecting and translating inscriptions is of little help in the study and the dating of Cham sculptures. If there are, today, about 230 officially tallied inscriptions from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, in Sanskrit, ancient Cham, or in both languages, only about one hundred of these inscriptions have truly been studied. Mainly inscribed on stelae, they contain information concerning boundaries or religious events, but are of little use in dating the temples. Firstly, stelae may have been moved from one temple to another, and, secondly, it is not always easy to know whether the date on the stelae is that of the temple’s inauguration or of the start of its construction which, given the length of time that building could take, limits the precision of possible dating.
Architect Henri Parmentier, notably in this category as well, was a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and hired by the EFEO at its creation. Between 1902 and 1908, he uncovered the main Cham sites (though not all, as is too often believed), publishing the related findings in his majestic two-volume book Descriptive Inventory of the Cham Monuments of Annam in 1909 and 1918.
7. Frieze of monkeys,
Bas-relief, Sandstone, length 64 cm,
Thâp-Mam style, 11th – 12th Century (detail).
He uncovered the monuments of My Son and Dong Duong in 1902 and 1903, those of Po Klaung Garai in 1908 and the Po Nagar in Nha Trang between 1906 and 1909. We owe the creation, in 1918, of the Cham Museum in Da Nang (formerly Tourane) to him; the museum was given his name after its enlargement in 1936. Jean-Yves Claeys (1896-1979), was another architect who graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris as well as the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Nice. An employee of the Public Works administration in Indochina, he became a member of the EFEO in 1927, then curator of the monuments of Annam. He dedicated his work not only to Cham architecture but also to archaeology, notably to uncovering the Thâp-Mam site in 1934-35 after working on Tra Kieu in 1920.
Parmentier and Claeys not only uncovered monuments buried in vegetation but also drew up precise lists that catalogued, for the purpose of protection, statues and inscriptions for the museums of the EFEO and carried out several digs in the immediate surroundings of the main monuments.
It was common to amalgamate the responsibilities of the archaeologist and museum curator into a single role during the first half of the twentieth century
Philippe Stern (1875-1979), was the director of the Guimet Museum in Paris, and corresponding member of the EFEO as of 1930. Putting observation before theorisation, he set out a method of dating that became the reference: He “based…his analyses on a rigorous and comparative study of the evolution of specific motifs that decorated arcatures, pilasters, friezes, small columns, pièces d’accent and other architectural elements.”
In 1936, with his protégé Gilberte de Coral-Rémusat, in the course of his single mission to Asia, he visited – in addition to Cambodia, of course – the most important monuments of Champa. Following his providential re-dating of the Bayon in Angkor, which he made younger by taking it out of the ninth century and placing it in the twelfth, against the authorised and authoritarian opinion of the Finot- Parmentier-Goloubew trio, he proposed, first for Cham architecture and then for its sculpture, dating that created a solid precedent, even if it was to be subsequently completed and modified.
Jean Boisselier (1912-1996) took up the task later. After his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, he joined the EFEO in 1949. Having been made scientific head as of 1953 of the conservation work at Angkor, this formidable erudite analyst stimulated research for dozens of years, as much for Thai or Cham art as for that of the Khmer. His work in the analysis, identification and dating of Cham sculpture remains completely fundamental. This is true even if the master showed a certain reticence at the end of his life toward certain discoveries or rediscoveries. For example, he denied the discoveries at An My in 1982, despite their importance in allowing the confirmation of the existence of an early style of sculpture.
The contemporary Vietnamese school has, in recent years, brought a great deal to the knowledge of art from Champa. Ngo Van Doanh, Tran Ky Phuong and Pham Thuy Hop have, through their knowledge of the field, their immediate and renewed access to new archaeological discoveries, and their familiarity with Vietnamese sociology, also contributed to the renaissance of knowledge of Cham art. Po Dharma and Pierre-Bernard Lafont, in France, also participate in this process.
8. Frieze of monkeys,
Bas-relief, Sandstone, length 64 cm,
Thâp-Mam style, 11th – 12th Century.
Finally, there are those who, though strictly amateurs, collected more than they studied, and were often the source of great rivers of knowledge. Charles Lemire (1839-1912), French resident of Quang Nam, compiled a collection between 1886 and 1892, which he kept in the “Cham Garden” in Da Nang (Tourane) until 1891- 1892. Camille Paris, postal agent in Indochina first, then colonist, Father Cadière and Father Durand, Prosper d’Odend’hal, and Doctor Albert Sallet all efficiently contributed to the composition of a collection in the Cham museum in Da Nang (Tourane), not to forget Doctor Morice, who is discussed in more detail later. The Vietnamese collector Vu Kim Loc from Ho Chi Minh City is part of the process today. His collection, patiently assembled and mainly devoted to Cham metals, primarily jewellery and religious artefacts, is described in a very interesting book (see bibliography) written in collaboration with the eminent Vietnamese archaeologist Le Xuan Diem. The study of Cham art in general and Cham sculpture in particular needs such renewed initiatives to make headway.
The above piece comes from the collection of Doctor Claude- Albert Morice (1845-1877) who, after graduating from the Military School of Health in Lyons, became a doctor in the French Navy and spent his first period in Vietnam from 1872 to 1874 during which he devoted himself to his passion, natural history.
He collected numerous specimens and samples of the country’s fauna and flora and sent them to the Museum of Natural History in Lyons; he also made the history and languages of Vietnam his passion.
During his second sojourn, that was cut short by his untimely death, he was a doctor attached to the consulate in Thi Nay near the city of Qui Nhon, a region that was Cham and where the architectural traces of ancient Champa were abundant. Morice became particularly interested in the statuary of what was the heart of the ancient kingdom of Vijaya, finally conquered in 1471 under the rule of Le Thanh Tong by the Viets during the Nam Tien (‘March to the South’).
He gathered – in the spirit of the times which saw more a scientific desire to assemble elements of documentation than to constitute a true art collection – a group of statues. Some were complete, others broken, having decorated the Cham temples and fallen from their brick structures as they gradually sank into the ground. Habitually, these stones were left untouched by the Viets, who feared the vengeful spirits of Cham gods.
No one knew what had happened to Doctor Morice’s collection until Robert Stenuit, founding director in 1970 of GRASP (Groupe de recherche archeologique sous-marine post-medievale) (Research group for submarine post-Medieval archaeology) and the discoverer, notably, in 1976 of the Witte Leeuw (1), learned, thanks to documentary research, that a French Messageries Maritimes boat, the Mekong, sank on 17 June 1877 close to the coast of Somalia. The boat had left Saigon for Marseille and apparently contained Doctor Morice’s Cham collection.
The Illustration, in its 21 July 1877 issue, related the tragic incident: the sinking steamboat was depicted with sixty-six passengers and 180 officers and crew reaching, thanks to longboats, with more or less difficulty, the shore that was luckily close by.
To locate with precision the place where the boat had sunk, Stenuit, for three long years, consulted numerous archives, notably those of the Messageries Maritimes and the former Protectorate of Aden; he studied manuscripts and maps and decided to set up an expedition to recover the statues. He was financed by two Americans from Pennsylvania, Mr. Edwards and his son.
On 9 October 1995 a boat sailing from Djibouti reached the site north of Somalia. Of course, the crew knew that the shipment had been pillaged at the time of the wreck by the Somalians in exchange for sparing the lives of the survivors and camels to carry them to the north coast. However, Stenuit was practically sure that the Cham stone pieces, due to their weight and their minimal interest for local inhabitants, had remained in the sunken ship. For the submarine archaeologists, the problem appeared simple to resolve: here was a sunken ship whose structure corresponds to that of the Mekong and its orientation on the sea floor as described in the Illustration (stern to the south, prow to the north). The search, carried out with the help of a magnetometer placed in a longboat christened Docteur Morice in homage to the Frenchman, resulted in the identification of a wreck among eight potential ships, the area being somewhat of a marine graveyard. The inscription Messageries imperials (Imperial Transport) on plates brought up to the surface confirmed the successful identification. In this way, statue after statue, eighteen pieces in all, were brought up. However, Robert Stenuit was dissatisfied; the number was insufficient, as his initial estimation based on his knowledge of the list of pieces expedited foresaw at least ten other pieces. In fact, better exploitation of archives allowed him, upon his return to France, to learn that a first shipment, sent before the shipwreck, had reached Marseille and then Lyons. After some difficulties and thanks to an astonishing intuition, Stenuit located the ten missing statues at the Museum of Natural History in Lyons, where they had joined the zoological and botanical samples sent back to his home town years earlier by the doctor from Lyon.
To quote a lovely remark of Stenuit’s, these pieces he found stacked in a hallway at the museum, had been “buried rather than swallowed by sea”. A plain label mentioned for one of them: “Head of monster. Sandstone. Origin unknown. Cham art, 13th – 14th centuries. Received in 1933. MGL 2415”.
The pieces collected during Robert Stenuit’s expedition, including these, were separated in a sale at Christie’s in Amsterdam (2). The catalogue lists fourteen numbers for thirteen complete pieces and seven fragments.
The twofold interest of Stenuit’s search is, first, it facilitated dating certain Cham pieces more precisely (3) and, second, it challenged certain commonly accepted pedigrees as a result of its other lesson. Steinuit’s “expedition” shows that the search for the origins of pieces is always tricky, paticularl gCha r lHistoyMuseu lbear :date ,thearriva fthepiec smuc r(1877) y rnpublicdocument dthetruthtob .Wha dithav ti sha nlef yindividua gconfusio sgeneration tb,betwee randCha rIndia r lsee ro nabusivelygeneri Fa ”
(1) The Witte Leeuw (“White Lion”), returning from the Dutch East Indies, was sent to the bottom by two Portuguese caraques on 2 June 1613, off the coast of today’s Jamestown (Saint Helena).
(2) Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art, Christie’s Amsterdam, 31 October 2000, pp.96-103.
(3) For example, No. 197 in the catalogue of Christie’s sale datable from the Thâp-Mam style, 12th century, allows a happy comparison with No. 175 reproduced in Le musee de sculpture Cam de Dà Nang (The Da Nang Museum of Cham Sculpture) (Editions de l’AFAO, Paris 1997, p. 168). The comparison of the two heads of Kala, the first supporting a divinity, the second alone, removes all doubt concerning the piece in the Da Nang Museum, very probably found in Tra Kieu and put in the museum in 1918. If stylistic differences remain, the overall economy common to the two pieces and the very slight probability of forgeries at Morice’s time, are so many arguments in favour of the authenticity of the Da Nang piece.