Funan

The name and the sources

No one knows what the people of Funan called their own country. The name comes from Chinese records, and is often connected with an old Khmer word for mountain, though that link is not certain. Almost everything written about it comes from China: the report of Kang Tai and Zhu Ying, envoys of the Wu court who visited around 245–250 CE, survives in fragments quoted in later histories, and the official histories of the Jin, the southern dynasties and the Liang add embassies, names and stories. A few Sanskrit inscriptions from the region and the excavated remains of its ports complete the picture.

The founding story

The Chinese accounts tell of a foreigner named Hun Tian who arrived by sea, defeated and married the local queen Liuye, and founded the royal line. Hun Tian is generally taken as a Chinese form of Kaundinya, a Brahmin family name, and a Cham inscription of the seventh century tells a version of the same story in which Kaundinya marries a naga princess named Soma. The story is a charter myth, not history, but it shows how the rulers of the region wished to present themselves: as the issue of an Indian Brahmin and a local sovereign.

Expansion and trade

In the early third century a king the Chinese call Fan Shiman is said to have conquered neighbouring states, built a fleet, and taken the title of great king. Funan sat on the route by which ships from India and the Bay of Bengal, unwilling or unable to sail straight through the open South China Sea, worked along the coast and crossed the narrow neck of the Malay peninsula. Its harbours were where goods changed hands.

The French archaeologist Louis Malleret excavated Oc Eo in 1944 and found the evidence: Indian-style seals and jewellery with short Brahmi inscriptions, Roman gold medallions of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, Chinese mirrors, and workshops for glass beads. Aerial survey showed a network of canals linking Oc Eo with inland centres such as Angkor Borei.

Indian forms of rule

A Chinese history records that in the late fourth or early fifth century a second Kaundinya, coming from the south, reformed the kingdom "according to the customs of India". Whatever the truth of the story, the later rulers used Sanskrit names ending in -varman, patronised Vishnu, Shiva and the Buddha, and sent embassies with Buddhist gifts to the Liang court in the early sixth century. Funanese monks such as Sanghapala and Mandrasena worked as translators in China.

Decline and the question of unity

In the sixth century the power of Funan passed to Chenla, a polity based further inland, whose kings later claimed descent from the same line, and by the seventh century Chinese sources describe Funan as absorbed. Historians now debate how unified Funan ever was. George Coedès treated it as the first of the "Indianized states", a single kingdom, while later scholars, notably Michael Vickery, have argued that the Chinese name covered a shifting group of delta chiefdoms that the envoys reported as one.