and with regard to one particular Malay port, notes“East and West meet
together so that every day great crowds gather there. Precious goods and rare
merchandise– these are all there.” Ports developed in the Sunda Straits
region between the islands of Sumatra and Java, where the king of a place
called Zhiayang was said to be importing horses from the Kushan Empire in
the mid-third centuryCE.Thailand was another hotspot of trade. At Khuan
Lukpad (“Bead Mound”) glass beads were found similar to those of Poduca
along with a mutilated Roman coin and two carnelian intaglios done in
Roman motifs, one showing the goddess Tyche. Etched beads and other
jewelry have also been found in Malaysian sites, including a gold ring with a
Hindu design and a carnelian seal with Sanskrit writing. In return for such
manufactured products, the people of both areas likely offered tin.
One of the most interesting places to emerge in the earlyfirst millennium
CEwas the kingdom of Champa located up the coast from Funan in what is
today central Vietnam. The Cham coast should have been a good place for
ships going and coming from China to stop for cargo. The region offered
desirable products, which the Chams obtained from trade with the peoples of
the interior highlands who needed salt from the coast. These included the
usual ivory and rhino horn along with such rare woods as ebony, sandalwood,
camphor, aloeswood, and lakawood, a form of black bamboo. Cinnamon,
cardamom, lacquer, and kingfisher, peacock, and other rare feathers were also
available as were tortoise shell and pearls from the coast. Cham ports were
also known to be major slave markets, and herein lay the problem with
Cham commerce.
Cham kings exercised only loose control over much of their long coastline,
which led to a chronic problem with piracy. The Cham kings themselves did
not have a rich agricultural hinterland to tax as did the Funanese to the
south and the Vietnamese to the north, so they came to depend on plunder
as a major source of state revenue. In the long run such a society was doomed
to extinction, whichfinally came at the hands of the Vietnamese in thefif-
teenth century. In the shorter run it meant that ships often detoured around
the Cham coast, decreasing Cham income from peaceful commerce and fur-
ther increasing the need to rely on plunder. Champa, which should have
been a major partner in Southeast Asian trade, was relegated to a secondary
position, which it enjoyed only during more tranquil times.
Champa and Funan were geographically much closer to China than to
India, a short sail across the South China Sea, which, however, can be a very
turbulent body of water, notorious for its typhoons. Some speculation has
put the Chinese on the Malaya peninsula as early as the mid-fourth century
BCEand Chinese merchants in India on a limited basis by thefirst centuryCE.
Third centuryCEChinese documentary sources allude to direct sea trade with
India, and later in that century contact was said to have been established
between the Chinese and a kingdom in the Ganges delta called Tan-Mei
(probably Tamralipti). Commercial negotiations may have been carried on in
116 The all-water route