The Sui expedition of Liu Fang sacks the capital of Linyi

After the Sui reunified China, Linyi sent tribute, then stopped; according to the Book of Sui, courtiers told the emperor that the country abounded in rare treasures. At the end of the Renshou era (601–604) Liu Fang, who had just forced the surrender of Lý Phật Tử in Jiaozhou, was made commander of the Huanzhou route. He sent Ning Changzhen, governor of Qinzhou, overland with more than ten thousand foot and horse, while he himself sailed with the fleet; the Book of Sui adds several thousand convicts. Emperor Wen died, and under Emperor Yang, in the first month of 605, the army reached the sea-mouth. The Chams met it on huge war elephants and at first had the upper hand, until Liu Fang had small pits dug and covered with grass, lured the enemy on with a feigned retreat and, when the elephants stumbled, shot them with crossbows, so that they turned and trampled their own ranks. Passing the bronze pillars named after the Han general Ma Yuan, the Sui army marched south for eight days to the capital; in the fourth month, says the Zizhi tongjian, King Fanzhi abandoned it and fled to the sea.

Liu Fang took eighteen ancestral tablets cast in gold — the kingdom, the Book of Sui explains, had had eighteen generations of kings — and set up a stone recording his victory. The captured Buddhist scriptures, 564 bundles holding more than 1,350 works written in the Kunlun script on palm leaves, were sent to the translation office at Luoyang. On the way back the soldiers’ feet swelled and four or five in ten died; Liu Fang too fell ill and died. The Sui organised the conquered lands into commanderies, but Fanzhi recovered his realm, sent envoys to apologise and later paid tribute to the Tang. Specialists in historical geography place the capital taken in 605 at Trà Kiệu in the Thu Bồn valley, where, in Rolf Stein’s view, the capital of Linyi had moved after the Chinese attack of 446. Georges Maspero and George Coedès identified Fanzhi with King Sambhuvarman of the Sanskrit inscriptions of Mỹ Sơn, but A. O. Zakharov considers such identifications of the kings of Linyi and Champa insufficiently grounded.