Chenla

Chenla, or Zhenla, is the name Chinese chroniclers gave to the Khmer-speaking lands of the lower Mekong between the late sixth and early ninth centuries CE, the era historians call the pre-Angkor period of Cambodia. It began as a dependency of Funan, outgrew its overlord and was eventually succeeded by the Khmer Empire of Angkor. Whether Chenla was ever a single kingdom is doubtful: many modern historians see it as a shifting set of principalities that outsiders lumped together under one name.

Neither "Chenla" nor "Funan" appears in Old Khmer. Both are Chinese labels for polities that sent tribute missions to the imperial court, and their original meaning is unknown, as the historian Michael Vickery stressed. The name stayed in Chinese use for centuries; the envoy Zhou Daguan still used it for Cambodia in the thirteenth century. Modern scholars, however, reserve it for the period before Angkor.

The annals of the Sui dynasty describe Chenla as a vassal of Funan whose embassy reached China in 616 or 617. Inscriptions in Sanskrit and Old Khmer fill in some of the picture. They name a ruler Viravarman and then the princes Bhavavarman I and his brother Citrasena, who took the royal name Mahendravarman. Together, according to the epigraphic reconstruction, the two attacked Funan around the turn of the seventh century. Vickery called the early leaders the "Dângrêk Chieftains", after the mountains around which their stone inscriptions are found.

Isanavarman I, whose inscriptions are dated 627 and 637, completed the absorption of Funan's old territories and founded a new capital, Isanapura, identified with the ruins of Sambor Prei Kuk in central Cambodia. Older scholarship, led by George Cœdès, placed the dynasty's homeland near the mountain temple of Vat Phou in southern Laos, but that identification is now questioned.

Jayavarman I, who reigned from about 657 until perhaps the 680s or 690s, left some twenty inscriptions spread from Vat Phou to the Gulf of Thailand, suggesting wide authority. After his death the realm fragmented. His daughter Jayadevi, ruling near the later site of Angkor, lamented "bad times" in an inscription of 713. The histories of the Tang dynasty report that after 707 the country divided into Land Chenla in the north and Water Chenla around the Mekong delta. Vickery regarded this neat division as misleading, arguing that until 802 the region held a number of smaller states rather than two great ones.

Kings took Sanskrit names ending in -varman, meaning "protected by", and built brick temples to Shiva, Vishnu and Harihara, a combined form of the two gods; Buddhism was also present. Inscriptions show, however, that most farmers bore Khmer names and honoured local, often female, deities and ancestors in wooden shrines that have not survived. Temples held land and workers and functioned as powerful economic institutions, and inscriptions distinguish many categories of unfree labourers. Wealth rested on wet-rice farming and irrigation, and the economic centre of gravity moved inland from the coastal trading ports of the Funan era.

Inscriptions grow scarce in the eighth century. Late in that century Water Chenla fell under the influence of the Shailendra rulers of Java and of Srivijaya on Sumatra, and around 790 its last king appears to have been killed and his realm absorbed by the Javanese monarchy. Land Chenla kept sending embassies to China until at least 799. In 802 Jayavarman II, whose family had links to the south, proclaimed himself universal monarch, an event that historians conventionally take as the founding of the Khmer Empire.

Our 600, 700 and 800 maps draw this territory with the label "Chen-La", covering much of modern Cambodia and the Mekong delta, with Champa on the coast to the east. On the 900 map its place is taken by the Khmer Empire.