ancient kingdom known to us only by its Chinese name of Fu-nan, a transcription of the old Khmer word for 'mountain'. Fu-nan was centred on the lower course and in the delta of the Mekhong River, and the great Khmer empire grew out of it. The earliest accounts of it were written by two Chinese envoys, K'ang T'ai and Chu Ying, who visited it during the period A.D. 245-250 and, while there, gathered accounts of a large number of other South Sea kingdoms. It was these envoys who recorded the local tradition that the kingdom of Fu-nan had been founded by an Indian named Kaundinya, who came by sea and married the local chieftainess. This tradition is accepted by all authorities, who date the event towards the end of the first century A.D. Kaundinya's family was replaced by indigenous kings who used the name Fan, now known to have been an ethnic one.⁹ But at a period considered to be in the first half of the fifth century A.D., a second Kaundinya came by sea from P'an-p'an to Fu-nan and Indianized the kingdom afresh. All the later kings of Fu-nan claimed to be of the Kaundinya family, which is known from Mysore inscriptions to have been a prominent one in South India during the second and fourth centuries A.D.¹⁰ P'an-p'an was clearly an Indianized kingdom somewhere on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula and was bounded at its north by the Indianized kingdom called Lang-ya-hsiu by the Chinese. The Liang shu says that the traditional founding of Lang-ya-hsiu occurred 400 years before A.D. 515. The name continues to appear in various forms up to the sixteenth century A.D. and is considered in all the forms to represent the Malay name Langkasuka. Although its boundaries may have changed from time to time, it was always centred in Patani.

Among the accounts taken back to China by K'ang T'ai and Chu Ying is one of a place called Tun-sun, which had a port apparently of the same name. It contained five kingdoms (unnamed), all of which were vassals of Fu-nan. The region of Tun-sun would appear to have been the northern part of the Malay Peninsula, if not the whole, and its port must clearly have been on the west coast, since it was a main entrepÔt to which merchants came in great numbers to barter and where people from the East and West met. There never has been a main entrepÔt on the east coast of the Peninsula owing to the meteorological conditions there. The western side of Tun-sun was in relation with India and the eastern with Indo-China. The Chinese account shows quite clearly that Tun-sun

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⁹ Gaspardone, op. cit., pp. 480-3; R. A. Stein, "Le Lin-yi, sa Contribution á la Formation du Champa et ses Liens avec la Chine", Han-hiue, vol. 2 (Peking, 1947), pp. 251-58.

¹⁰ B. R. Chatterjee, "Recent Advances in Kambuja Studies", Journal of the Greater India Society (London, 1931), p. 139.