A Hindu kingdom of seafarers and temple-builders that endured on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam for more than a millennium, its last southern remnant absorbed by Vietnam in 1832. Neither Chinese nor Vietnamese, the Cham took up Indian religion, script, and statecraft, grew rich on the sea route between China and India, and left red-brick temple-towers still standing among the rice fields — yet Champa itself has nearly dropped out of the world's memory.
Along the coast of central Vietnam, brick towers the color of dried blood still rise from the rice fields. They were not built by the Vietnamese, and they are not Chinese. They are the work of the Cham, a people whose Hindu kingdom of Champa endured on this shore for more than a thousand years, worshipped Shiva, sailed and raided the great sea road between China and India, and once sacked the Khmer capital at Angkor. Then centuries of Vietnamese expansion broke its independence. Today most people have never heard the name, and the towers stand for a civilization the world forgot.