Champa

Champa was a network of independent Cham polities strung along the coast of what is now central and southern Vietnam, with territory at various points also reaching into present-day Laos and Cambodia. Its history runs from around 192 AD, when the local official Khu Lien broke away from Han Chinese rule, to 1832, when the Nguyen emperor Minh Mang annexed Panduranga, the last surviving Cham principality. Champa reached its greatest extent and influence in the ninth and tenth centuries, when its Indianized coastal city-states controlled stretches of the South China Sea trade routes carrying spices and silk between India, China and the wider region, giving the kingdom a maritime rather than a land-based character built around a string of ports along the central Vietnamese coast rather than one unified inland capital.