Funan and the First Southeast Asian State

c. 100 CE — Southeast Asia, Funan

Today: Southern Vietnam and Cambodia (the Mekong delta)

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.

Worth knowing: Excavators at Oc Eo found a Roman medallion of Antoninus Pius, struck in the 150s, buried in the Mekong delta — an emperor's face that had travelled from Italy to Vietnam while Rome and China each thought the other a rumour at the end of the road.

Pattern: Trade-route shift — The path or medium of exchange moves, and a place or power rises or declines because it sits on or off the new route.

Entry 71 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.