In 1470-71 Lê Thánh Tông led a large invasion of Champa in response to Cham raids on the Vietnamese south, and in March 1471 stormed the Cham capital of Vijaya. The Vietnamese annals claim 60,000 Cham killed and 30,000 captured, among them the king; the city was destroyed and the kingdom's northern and central territories annexed and settled with Vietnamese military colonists. Champa, which had existed as a Hindu and later partly Muslim polity on the central Vietnamese coast for more than a millennium, was reduced to the small southern principality of Panduranga and never recovered; Cham communities dispersed to Cambodia, the Malay world and Hainan, where their descendants remain. The conquest is the decisive episode in the nam tiến, the long southward movement of Vietnamese settlement that would eventually reach the Mekong delta. Its numbers rest entirely on the annals of the victors and are not independently corroborated by Cham inscriptions or external sources.
Lê Thánh Tông of Đại Việt invaded Champa, stormed its capital Vijaya, and reduced the kingdom to a small southern remnant, opening central Vietnam to Vietnamese settlement
Cham records were largely destroyed and Vietnamese chronicles give only casualty and captive claims - 60,000 killed and 30,000 taken at Vijaya - which historians treat as conventional round numbers rather than demography. There is no settlement survey or register from which a kingdom-wide population could be reconstructed, and published guesses vary by an order of magnitude.
The upper figure of 60,000 killed at the fall of Vijaya is the claim of the Đại Việt court annals and is the only number available; historians treat such figures in Southeast Asian court chronicles as rhetorical, and there is no independent evidence — archaeological or documentary — by which to test it. No lower bound can be established.
The storming and destruction of Vijaya, the killing and enslavement of its inhabitants and the desecration of Cham religious sites are recorded in the Vietnamese court annals, the principal surviving account of the campaign.
Vietnam, Cambodia