Chapter 2191: Peninsula Historical Tales · King Huan

When the two foremost commanders in Champa's founding and expansion fell into discord, even to the point of a complete break, it was bound to have a major impact on Champa's development—and that impact was inevitably negative.

And when irreconcilable contradictions arose between the two, the outcome was bound to be the demise of one side. The victor, without question, was Liu Wenyan, for he after all held the moral high ground of a sovereign.

In the sixth year of Jianlong of the Han Empire (1023), the Marquis of Mao, Liu Gong, was ordered to commit suicide at Jinzhou, the capital of Champa. He was not yet fifty years old, and people of the time sighed and mourned for him.

The death of the Marquis of Mao was, without question, an enormous loss for Champa. It interrupted the vigorous momentum of expansion and enterprise that Champa had maintained since its founding, and it in fact affected Champa's progress toward annexing the Chenla Kingdom to the north.

This matter could also be said to be the greatest stain on Liu Wenyan, who had been brilliant and mighty his entire life, and the thing for which he was most criticized. After all, no matter what faults Liu Gong had, at least his crimes did not merit death—and the reason for executing him was a case of "trumped-up charges"...

If one truly had to say what crime Liu Gong had committed, it could be summed up in eight words: merits overshadowing the sovereign, talents too great to be controlled.

For decades, Liu Gong had been renowned throughout the South Seas as Champa's foremost meritorious minister and warrior. Of course, he was worthy of this glory and these achievements.

By the sixth year of Jianlong, of the eleven prefectures held by the state of Champa, more than half had been conquered or pacified by armies led by Liu Gong, and he had participated in essentially all of the rest.

Liu Shu had early on established eight prefectures—Jin, Qing, Fu, Ping, Ning, Shun, Song, and De—on the foundation of the old Champa territories. Later, during the empire's war with Chenla, he seized the opportunity to take the Mekong River delta region, and after ten years of migration, pioneering, and management, he established three more prefectures: Jiangzhou, Jianzhou, and Maozhou.

The latter three prefectures were taken together by Liu Wenyan and Liu Gong, but the subsequent consolidation and defense, as well as the continuous raids against the Chenla Kingdom, were always directed by Liu Gong.

One should know that Champa's "strategy of annihilating Chenla" was proposed by Liu Gong and executed under his charge, and it achieved enormous results. It was only under Liu Gong's unrelenting harassment and raids, maintained year after year for over a decade, that Champa's complete momentum toward swallowing Chenla was formed.

Although Liu Wenyan and Liu Gong's reputations within Champa were somewhat like "rival brilliances," when comparing actual military achievements and merits, Liu Wenyan was more than a notch weaker than Liu Gong.

Because of his arduous toil and great merit, Liu Shu enfeoffed him as Grand General and Commissioner for the Pacification of Chenla, bestowed upon him the title of Marquis of Mao, and designated Maozhou as his garrison and fief. Maozhou was roughly the location of later-day Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

Liu Shu's favor and trust toward Liu Gong, his adopted son and commander, could well be imagined—surpassing all nobles and powerful figures. Even his own princes and grandsons, as well as the first consort clan like the Lady Fu family, received no such treatment.

Therefore, Liu Gong's tragic end came not only from Liu Wenyan's suspicion, but also because tall trees catch the wind—when ten thousand voices condemn a man, that too was likely a very important reason.

At the same time, Liu Gong had originally been a lowly servant in the Duke of Chu's mansion, yet he rose step by step to become the pillar of the state of Champa, was adopted as a son by Liu Shu, and gained a resounding reputation that spread across the South Seas. His experience could be called inspirational, and he was greatly admired by countless Han merchants and settlers who had gone south to the seas.

In the great colonization of the South Seas by Han people, countless heroes and successful figures had indeed emerged, but those who could start from such a low point as Liu Gong and achieve such enormous success and renown were truly rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.

Even speaking only within Champa itself, while being envied and excluded by the old nobles, Liu Gong enjoyed extremely high prestige among the common scholars and people. This prestige, Liu Shu could tolerate; Liu Wenyan, however, demonstrated his attitude through concrete actions.

The Marquis of Mao, Liu Gong, could be said to have been ruined by his own reputation.

Before being summoned to Jinlan City, Liu Gong perhaps had a premonition, and therefore gave solemn instructions to his eldest son, Liu Kan, requiring him to remain loyal to the royal house no matter what happened.

However, when news of Liu Gong's death reached Maozhou, in his fury Liu Kan cast aside all of his old father's instructions and immediately raised the troops of Maozhou in rebellion, under the banner of revenge.

Because of Liu Gong's prestige and influence in the region, many followers joined, and the momentum grew very large. Liu Kan also rapidly led his army to capture Jiangzhou and advanced eastward toward Songzhou (Ho Chi Minh City).

On Liu Wenyan's side, he had still been hesitating over how to deal with Liu Gong's family and the military and civilians of Maozhou, but when news of the rebellion reached the royal capital, he hesitated no longer.

Thereupon, Liu Wenyan personally led thirty thousand troops by land and sea southward. Liu Kan led his forces to meet him, and the two sides fought at Songzhou. In military command ability, Liu Kan was not even remotely comparable to his father, while Liu Wenyan, in the prime of his life, had not lost his command skills—indeed, they appeared ever more seasoned. Combined with political offensives and naval superiority, the destruction of the Maozhou rebels was merely a matter of time.

Under Liu Wenyan's command, pacifying the "Liu Kan Rebellion" took the state of Champa only a month and a half. However, to eliminate the negative effects from Liu Gong's death through the Maozhou rebellion, Liu Wenyan needed three to four years before he could barely manage it.

Of course, it was very difficult to eliminate completely. The political negative effects of Liu Gong's death were far greater than Liu Wenyan had imagined, and this even caused, to a certain extent, ideological confusion within the state of Champa.

By comparison, the Liu Kan Rebellion was merely the most direct and most intense reaction. At the same time, economically, it caused severe destruction to the four southwestern prefectures including Songzhou, and the twenty years of painstaking effort in the Mekong River delta region was nearly half destroyed.

Militarily, it not only lowered Liu Wenyan's prestige in the army but also destroyed Champa's most elite Maozhou Army, whose officers and soldiers were essentially all purged. Champa's military strength suffered greatly.

These effects all required Liu Wenyan to pay an even greater price to pacify and compensate. But as to whether Liu Wenyan regretted it—at least at the time Liu Kan raised the rebellion, he did not.

On the contrary, at the time he was even glad. Liu Gong's prestige among the military and civilians was so great, and his family's influence in the "River Isle lands" was so enormous—if this were not curbed, how could it be allowed to continue?

But the bitter consequences were something Liu Wenyan could only slowly taste in the years that followed.

Because of this rebellion, the Chenla Kingdom to the north began to have ideas. When they learned that Liu Gong, who had oppressed them for twenty years, had been killed by the King of Champa, the entire Chenla court celebrated. After Champa's internal turmoil, the whole nation rejoiced. At least the princes in the Tonlé Sap region who had been frequently raided by Champa were all elated and gloating.

Thereupon, taking advantage of Champa's internal strife having just ended and the realm being in disarray, the Chenla Kingdom once again mustered its courage, united with the various princes who had long formed de facto independent fiefdoms, gathered seventy thousand troops and ten thousand war elephants, and launched a southern campaign, intending to recover the lands and cities that had been forcibly taken by Champa over thirty years.

Facing Chenla's counterattack, Liu Wenyan had no choice but to accept battle, and once again personally led the campaign, assembling forty thousand troops by land and water, three thousand cavalry, and one hundred cannons—truly sending out all his elite forces.

With Champa's decades of accumulated strength, maintaining an army of this scale was not too difficult. But after the Maozhou Rebellion, morale and fighting spirit were not so easily restored. It was only under the stimulus of a national war that the officers and soldiers remained brave and eager to fight.

But this great national war, claimed to be the largest between the two sides in twenty-five years, took Liu Wenyan half a year before he achieved a decisive victory over the Chenla army.

After this battle, the Champa army under Liu Wenyan's command annihilated twenty thousand enemies and took the vast southwestern region of Tonlé Sap. Champa's military spearhead then extended further north, to the point where the Chenla capital could be reached between dawn and dusk.

This directly prompted the Chenla royal house to move west to avoid disaster, and it was also the mark of the complete collapse of the Chenla regime. From that time on, the Chenla court was essentially nothing but an empty shell, with no ability to restrain the various princes and tribes. The vast central region of the peninsula (mainly the area of modern Thailand) formed a chaotic situation of warlords carving up territory.

This situation was originally a golden opportunity for Champa to advance and annex, but due to the preceding internal strife and great war, Liu Wenyan had the will but not the strength.

By comparison, the state of Linhai, which had established footholds along the coast of the "Gulf" (the Gulf of Thailand) early on, took the opportunity to expand to a certain extent into the great central plain of the peninsula.

As the King of Champa, Liu Wenyan knew well that he could not focus only on military conquest and rule—he had to devote more energy to the construction of state institutions, the stabilization of public order, and the recovery and recuperation of the military and civilians. And this was the primary work of the remainder of his reign, which was not long.

Liu Wenyan passed away in the twelfth year of Jianlong (1029), at the age of fifty-two, having reigned for only eight years. He died diligent and hardworking, and his posthumous name was Huan.

As the King of Champa, Liu Wenyan's reign was not particularly long, but from his time as Crown Prince, his contributions to Champa from its founding through its growth and strengthening could not be erased—indeed, they were crucial. He laid a solid foundation for the continued expansion during the reign of his successor, Liu Jirong.

And the principle of "the son conquers the realm, the father sits upon it" was most thoroughly embodied in the father-son pair of Liu Shu and Liu Wenyan.

As for the family of the Marquis of Mao, Liu Gong—after pacifying the Liu Kan Rebellion, Liu Wenyan carried out a severe purge, stripping the title, exterminating the clan, and uprooting the family entirely from Maozhou.

However, Liu Gong did not thereby become extinct without heirs. His third son, Liu Jiong, being Liu Wenyan's son-in-law, was preserved under the protection of the Princess, but during the years of Liu Wenyan's reign, he lived in constant fear and trembling.

Before Liu Wenyan passed away, perhaps out of guilt, or perhaps pressured by the remembrance and longing for Liu Gong that could never be eliminated from court and country, Liu Wenyan restored the title of Marquis of Mao, with Liu Jiong inheriting it.

Of course, the restored marquisate, whether in status or treatment, was vastly inferior to that of Liu Gong's time. But when the line of Liu Jiong reached its seventh-generation descendant, the Liu family rose again, becoming powerful ministers of the state of Champa, at one point seizing the highest power of the nation and leading Champa into the "Struggle for Supremacy in the South Seas"...