Commodity and Market 11
of Siam and on the southeast coast of present-day Vietnam respectively.
We can reasonably assume that the Funanese and the Chams had been
skilful seamen capable of undertaking transfers even before the founding
of their kingdoms. Probably, Indian vessels were chartered for the last
stretch of the voyage from the west coast of the Isthmus to the Indian
coast. As mentioned by G. Cœdès, around the beginning of the Christian
era, early Indian settlements founded by Indian traders and immigrants
increased in the region around the northern Malay Peninsula and the
Gulf of Siam.^30 The text of the Han shu cited above tells about arrivals of
Indian traders in China’s southern port “to offer tribute” during the reign
of Emperor Wu.
In the third century Ćĉ, during the reign of Sun Quan two envoys,
Zhu Ying and Kang Tai, from the state of Wu were sent to reconnoiter
the Nanhai countries including Funan. Kang Tai recorded that Funan was
capable of building large vessels that could carry a hundred passengers.^31
By this time, Funan’s power had extended to the Isthmian region and
hence it controlled the luxury trade between China and India.^32 Another
Chinese source records that, shortly before Ćĉ 484, the king of Funan,
Jayavarman, sent a trading ship to Guangzhou. On the return voyage, an
Indian monk, Nagasena, took passage on board the trading ship on his
βirst leg of the long journey home.^33 This information offers another piece
of evidence suggesting that Funan was a major player in maritime trade
and shipping between the Gulf of Siam and South China. However, the
attack on it by its northern neighbor, Zhenla, in the following century led
to its decline and subsequent collapse.
The zenith of Funan as a regional sea power and its subsequent
decline around the end of the βifth and sixth centuries coincided with the
transition from what Paul Wheatley terms “the Isthmian Age”,^34 to the
rise of Java and Sumatra as trading, shipping and transshipment centers.
Goods from the Indian Ocean for re-export to the China market would
be shipped all the way by sea to the new transshipment centers via the
Straits of Malacca. Simultaneously, the new era saw an increasing demand
in the trade to China for commodities produced in the Malay-Indonesian
Archipelago.
- G.. Cœdès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, ed. Walter F. Vella, trans.
Susan Brown Cowing (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1975),
pp. 14–5. - Hsu Yun-ts’iao, Nanyang shi, Vol. 1, p. 85.
- O.W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce, p. 142.
- Hsu Yun-ts’iao, Nanyang shi, Vol. 1, p. 142, citing Nanqi shu 南齐书 [Standard
dynastic history of the South Qi], juan 58, section on Funan. - Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese, pp. 282–9.