influence larger land-based kingdoms in Burma, Java, Cambodia and
Thailand. We cannot follow in detail the rise of various early South-
east Asian kingdoms, but we will give some attention to the first of
these, known to the Chinese as ‘Funan’. By what name it was known
by its own people, we do not know.
Funan was the first kingdom in Southeast Asia to which Chinese
envoys were sent. Apart from a few references in inscriptions, the frag-
mentary reports of these envoys are the only records that remain of
Funan, apart from archaeological evidence. The Chinese mission
arrived probably around 228 CE, on behalf of the state of Wu, the
southernmost of the three kingdoms into which China was divided
after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE. Contact with the
Southern Ocean during the later Han had been intermittent at best, as
the principal trade route to Persia and India was still overland through
Central Asia. For the Wu rulers, however, cut off as they were from
northern China, only the maritime route was available.
It was probably to promote the potential benefits of increased
trade that Chinese envoys were dispatched to Funan, perhaps in
response to an earlier Funanese trade mission. From the accounts they
recorded, along with a few later inscriptions, we can gain some idea of
the economics and politics, the power and extent, of Funan. What
emerges is a polity owing its economic prosperity to a combination of
its agricultural base (a peasant population producing a surplus of rice)
and its geographic location about mid-way between southern China
and the Kra Isthmus.
Funan owed both its origins and most of its cultural borrowing to
Indian traders and the occasional Brahmin priest who had put into its
principal port of Oc-eo over the two centuries before the Chinese
envoys arrived. It was founded, the Chinese reported, as a result of a
marriage between an Indian Brahmin and a female ruler, a probably
mythical union symbolising the syncretism of Indian and local culture.
But we should beware of placing too much credence in Chinese
descriptions of Funan—or of other early Southeast Asia kingdoms.^1
Early relations