Funan and the First Southeast Asian State

Ships sailing between India and China had to round the Malay peninsula or portage across it, and Funan sat where they stopped. Its port at Oc Eo has yielded Roman coins, Persian glass, and Indian jewellery — a Mekong delta town holding goods from three thousand miles in every direction. Funan's rulers adopted Sanskrit, Hindu gods, and Indian ideas of kingship, not by conquest but because a trading elite found them useful. This is where Southeast Asia begins taking on the Indian religious and political vocabulary that Angkor would later build in stone.