The Chams sack Angkor

After the death of Suryavarman II the Khmer empire went through a period of palace revolutions. About 1165 a high official overthrew King Yashovarman II and reigned as Tribhuvanadityavarman, while the prince who would become Jayavarman VII, then campaigning in Champa, returned too late to save the king. In Champa another usurper, Jaya Indravarman of Gramapura, a learned dignitary of the late king Jaya Harivarman I, seized the throne between 1163 and 1167 and asked the Song court for investiture. Having made peace with Đại Việt in 1170, he attacked Cambodia: a Cham inscription says that, ‘presumptuous as Ravana’, he carried his army in chariots to fight the land of Kambu, but the war on land was indecisive.

He then tried the sea. A Cham fleet, guided by a shipwrecked Chinese, sailed along the coast to the mouth of the Mekong and up the river to the Great Lake, and Angkor was taken by surprise. The Song customs official Zhao Rugua (1225) dates the attack to the fifteenth day of the fifth month of the fourth Chunxi year — 13 June 1177 — and writes that pleas for peace were refused and the people slaughtered; according to the Chinese account cited by G. Coedès, the king was put to death, and the city was sacked. Some modern accounts date the sack to 1178. Michael Vickery questioned both the date and the event itself, distrusting the Chinese reports; a Khmer inscription from Prasat Chrung (K. 288), however, records that Jaya Indravarman IV defeated and killed Tribhuvanaditya.

Jayavarman VII rallied the resistance and defeated the Chams in a series of battles — among them a naval battle depicted on the walls of the Bayon and of Banteay Chhmar — and by 1181, four years after the invasion, the country was calm again and he was crowned. He rebuilt the capital within the moat and walls of Angkor Thom and, after long years of what the Chinese encyclopedist Ma Duanlin called patient dissimulation, took his revenge: in 1190 his army under the Cham prince Vidyanandana captured Vijaya and brought its king Jaya Indravarman — probably the same Jaya Indravarman IV — to Cambodia as a prisoner.