Cham Temples as Economic Systems

The temple in Champa as anything beyond a piece of architecture has rarely been examined by scholars.  Until 1972, the most complete description of the templewas by George Maspero, writing in the first few decades of the 20th century:
Each temple, in addition to the sanctuary itself, comprised a large domain, the revenues from which were used for the upkeep of the temple: it was a donation in perpetuity whereby the land with its inhabitants, its storehouses and even villages was devoted to God.  It also possessed an entire population of servants: priests first of all...then scores of slaves of both sexes, musicians and female dancers; there was even a gynaeceum full of “charming” women with their servants, whose revenue it collected.  This was all in addition to the treasures themselves---gold, silver, jewels and decorations for the image of the god; then too, there were the animals: elephants, oxen and buffalo for work (Maspero, 1928:l6, trans. in Embree & Dotson, V 1949:l9-20).
In 1972, I completed my M.A. thesis in Geography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, entitled “Resource Use Systems of Ancient Champa”.  It is the only comprehensive examination of the Chamic economy ever compiled.  It summarized what was known up to 1972 from Chamic epigraphy, Chinese contemporary writings, early European explorers, and late 19th and early 20th century geographic descriptions of the landscape and agricultural and maritime activities of the people of Central Vietnam, particularly the old Chamic culture area from Phan-ri to Thua-Thien (Binh-Tri-Thien).  The thesis reconstructed likely Chamic agricultural (cropping and irrigation technology) and maritime (boating and fishing technology) and then showed how these activities were carried out in the context of irrigation, boat-building and fishing mutual-aid associations (or cooperatives) and temples.  Thus the temple is much more than just a place of worship or a collection of statuary or tower technology.  It was also, I hypothesized, one of the three central sacro-economic institutions of traditional Chamic culture, along with the lineage and the mutual-aid society. 
The following paragraphs are excerpted from a paper I wrote for the 29th Congress of Orientalists for delivery in Paris, in 1973, and which was published as Congress’s Acts (Paris: L’Asiatheque, 1976:209-213). 
One distinguishing function of the temple as it evolved from a simple po-lan priestess role was to motivate its human agents to willingly perform the practices of transforming nature into an operation al resource-use system.  In addition, Maspero has described the Cam temple as comprising :a large domain, the revenues from which were used for the upkeep of the temple.”  Donated in perpetuity were the land with its inhabitants, its storehouses, animals and even whole villages along with servants and precious treasures (Maspero, 1928).  A straight-forward interpretation of inscriptions would indicate that the temple did indeed accumulate control over and management of various resources donated to them.  Yet inductive evidence of the primacy of lineage control and of cooperative management in Champa as well as contemporaneous temple analogues in Kambujadesa, Java and southern India suggests that a temple’s domain consisted instead of “perpetually” guaranteed partial or complete usufructory rights to resources than remained under secular mangement or even secular control.  It is reasonable however that temple administrators tended to dominate sodalities [mutual-aid associations] at central economic locations or under the patronage of major political figures.  
Dominant temples probably evolved economic activities such as found in ancient Persia and Burma (contemporaneous to Champa) in which specially-trained servants acted as artisans, craftsmen, spinners and weavers to produce both consumer goods for redistribution into the local economy and luxury items for long-distance trade.  Analogous activity in South India and evidence from Champa both point to consumption of such goods by local pilgrims.  Chinese soures indicate that sixth century Champa was already an export center for processing, reworking or fabricating goods made of gold, silver and copper, tortoise shell, coweries, eagle-wood, ivory and cotton cloth.  Various historians have suggested that Cam kings sponsored this manufacture, but it is posisible that instead they merely controlled its international movement while mutual-aid associations and/or their related temple organizations produced the goods for profit.  
As noted in my thesis (Sox, 1972), the temple was one of the chief institutions motivating political and economic organization among the rural population and offered opportunities for investment by the elite.  Such investment or more correctly endowment provided permanent revenue-earning shares in the produce of lands, livestock and fishing ground, the temporary and permanent use of labor to manufacture goods for sale to pilgrims and the elite, perhaps is  the loan of money or kind for interest, and the offering of services for required and requested rites and ceremonies.  The temple acted to concentrate willing and unwilling donations which it redistributed into the economy for a charge.  Sometimes that charge or interest accrued to the endower in the form of material return, and other times the endower was satisfied with the accrual of merit to his soul.
Royal endowments that were permanently inscribed on stone for all to see and for history to record must not overshadow the spiritual revenue from the laity for performance of rituals and for assurances of their intended objectives.  These were associated with annual holy-days that often occurred at the passing of one season into another or at a critical period in the cropping cycle and fishing season.  Rituals were also associated with personal events such as the passing from bachelorhood into marriage.  There is no record of ancient village life in Champa, but in the sixteenth century, Duong-van-An noted that at Chiem-an village (lit. pacified Champa) in Quang-nam province, “Everywhere...there are offerings as gifts dedicated to the Gods” (1553, trans., Bui Luong, 1961:56).  In this regard it is known that Cham rituals today are very numerous and are introduced into all phases of existence.  All of these involve offerings of food (meat, rice, alcohol and masticatories), prayers to the spirits, and a feast for the participants (American University, 1966:891).  Offerings may cost anything from a chicken to a goat or even a buffalo, and for collective sacrifices such as when there is- a drought, four or five buffaloes may be sacrificed, in addition to all the rest of the components, Cham men may also spend up to three or four months on pilgrimages Nguyen-thieu-Lau, 1943a:201), at least today, but such religious activity is suggested in past times as well by Leuba’s contention that at My-son—and one would except at the other temples—there were numerous salas or pilgrim’s rest-houses to take care of the large numbers who presumably came there for the annual ceremonies (1923:50).  All this would seem to clarify why the Cham spend two-thirds of their income on ritual and are forever in debt (Malleret, 1937:28).

[I am in the process of updating my 1972 Thesis based on more recent Vietnamese historic and archaeological research, translations of Chamic language writting, and Western intepretation of these and other source materials.  Later, I would like to return to Vietnam to verify the many hypotheses proposed in my M.A. research.]