CHAPTER I
THE CHAM
General characteristics of the Cham—A Mohammedan group—Its place among ancient civilizations—Social life—Dress and ornaments—The calendar—Rites accompanying the construction of a house, a cart, and a junk—Agriculture and industry—Medicines—The use of narcotics by criminals to stupefy their victims.
I have now concluded my investigation of the complex of barbarous peoples who, in spite of the proximity of civilized races, have preserved almost intact the rudimentary instincts and ferocious customs of primitive man. No account of these regions, however, would be complete which omitted all references to the Cham,[2] a curious Mohammedan people, formerly very powerful, whose conversion to that faith took place during the zenith of their power and prosperity. The traces of this one-time pre-eminence and the Cham themselves are fast disappearing.
The group belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian race, of which the parent stock seems to have inhabited the region of Annam. The Cham were formerly the rulers of the powerful Empire of Champa, which occupied, as far as we can judge from the somewhat conflicting and unsatisfactory evidence, the eastern coast-line of Indo-China proper. Marco Polo tells us of the fertility of this region in the thirteenth century. It may even be that this country is the self-same Zabai of which Ptolemy speaks.
Nominally Islam is the official religion of this people who seem to have passed through previous stages of Animism and Brahminism. The ancient faiths were too well established to be uprooted by the Moslem conquerors and the outcome is a strange conglomeration in which the ancestral superstitions frequently profit at the expense of the precepts of the Koran.
The last survivors of this once flourishing empire (in all perhaps 130,000 souls), are now confined to the province of Binh-Thuan in Annam. At the time of its downfall before the rising power of the Annamites many of the conquered preferred exile in Cambodia and Siam rather than humiliation and servitude in the land of their birth.
The opportunity of observing and noting the customs, beliefs, and institutions of the Cham was furnished by the preliminary survey which preceded the construction of the railway from Phantiet to Phanrang. During the whole of this time our party was quartered among this interesting people and had many opportunities of developing friendly, and even intimate, relations.
We cannot pretend to have been the first to do so, for previous to our arrival two eminent philologists, MM. Aymonier and Cabaton, had made a searching examination of the manuscripts in the possession of the priests and published two singularly exhaustive studies on the subject.[3]