by Jim Goodman
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| flooded plains east of Takeo, Cambodia |
When the Bronze Age was just
getting under way in northern Vietnam, around the 19th century BCE,
the lands around the Mekong Delta in the south were all swamps, subject to
annual flooding during the rainy season as well as by the waters of the
sea. Over 4800 km from its source
in the Tibetan highlands of China to its mouth in southern Vietnam, the Mekong
continuously carried and deposited a massive amount of silt as it coursed its
way to its mouth, while sea tides pushed these deposits around to create
patches of land.
Human habitation of the Delta
lands was quite difficult in the beginning. Peat bogs, swamps and thick forests covered most of the spaces
between the rivers. In some places
a portion of land rose one or two meters above sea level and on these fingers
of dry land people could make farms.
Most such sites were near the coast, such as in present-day Sóc Trăng
and Trà Vinh provinces, where the oldest Khmer settlements exist. Others were near the Seven Mountains of
An Giang province in the west, bordering Cambodia.
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| Khmer village on the canal east of Takeo |
It was this latter area that
bears evidence of the earliest organized state or political entity in the
Mekong Delta. It has become known
as Funan because that was the name ascribed to it by Chinese envoys to Angkor
Borei, now in southeast Cambodia, from the state of Wu in the third century
CE. No one knows what the people
living there called their country.
Local officials there informed the envoys the state had been around
since the 1st century CE, allegedly founded by an adventurer from
the Malayan Peninsula who subdued and then married the local princess.
At the time of
the envoys’ visit Funan was a rising power, in control of the sea trade between
China and India, which is what aroused the interest of the state of Wu, one of
the Three Kingdoms that formed after the collapse of China’s Han Dynasty. Whether it was a single state or, more
likely, a commercial alliance of ports, Funan apparently controlled the lands
and ports of southwest Vietnam, southern Cambodia, lower Thailand and as far
down the Malayan Peninsula as the Isthmus of Kra. Merchant ships in those days often offloaded their cargo
there for transport by land to the Indian Ocean side, where ships then took the
goods on to ports in India.
Sometimes ships sailed on to places in Indonesia, or even continued
beyond the islands to land on the Indian coast. Much of this trade comprised what were the luxury
goods of the times—animal hides, rhino horn, spices and gold.
Besides commerce, the rulers
of Funan oversaw an extensive agricultural sector, creating cultivable areas
through the construction of canals and levees. The traces of one important canal have been found that
linked Óc Eo, a site in the southeastern part of Vietnam’s An Giang province,
with contemporary Angkor Borei in Takeo province, Cambodia. If not the kingdom’s capital, Angkor
Borei was certainly one of its most important cities. It was also connected by canal to Takeo, which was a seaport
in ancient times. Sufficiently
sited inland, it was safe from any pirate raids or attacks by rivals.
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| Óc Eo jewelry |
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| Independence Monument, Takeo |
The canal that connected
Angkor Borei with Óc Eo ran just east of the Seven Mountains and was 70 km
long. Óc Eo had a rectilinear grid,
with transverse canals bisecting the main canal running north and an additional
canal linking it with the sea. Óc
Eo’s large population lived in houses on piles or stilts on the land between
the waterways. The city was home
to various craft specialists, as attested in the tools and artifacts unearthed
there, such as beads, rings, pendants and medallions, which is also evidence of
the existence of a class of people wealthy enough to indulge in such jewelry.
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| Muslim Chăm village en route to Angkor Borei |
In addition, archaeologists
have found coins and gold medallions from 2nd century Rome and
silver coins from Persia and Gupta India, a hint of how much East-West commerce
flourished back then. Indeed, the
2nd century Roman geographer, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, wrote
of a Greco-Roman merchant’s journey to Kattigara, at the easternmost end of the
Empire’s maritime trade route, where Roman merchants met their Chinese
counterparts. Some scholars
believe Kattigara was Óc Eo’s port.
Others suggest it was Rach Giá, with which Óc Eo was connected by a
canal, or Hà Tiên, a port in southwest Vietnam next to the Cambodian border.
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| Phnom Da |
Besides the jewelry and
artifacts preserved in museums, Óc Eo’s legacy has all but vanished. Other than archaeology students, it
doesn’t attract visitors. Angkor Borei, however a shadow it is of its
former incarnation, does get tourists who usually make it a day trip from Phnom
Penh. The starting point is Takeo,
a quiet, pleasant town a couple of hours south of the capital. A nice temple stands across from the
Independence Monument, a replica of an Angkor Era stone tower. A lotus-dappled lake flanks the town,
with a walkway and park on the near side that gets active in the evenings. But tourists don’t come to Takeo to
check out its small list of attractions.
They rarely stay the night anyway.
They come for the journey to Angkor Borei, both for its historical
significance as well as for the boat ride itself.
To get there visitors take a
motorboat from the wharf at the western edge of the city. A couple of restaurants serve good
Khmer food here and a kind of run down colonial-era neighborhood in the
vicinity adds a little bit of atmosphere.
A larger Vietnamese boat
bringing merchandise from Châu Đốc, distinguished by the pair of
eyes painted on the prow, may be docked at the wharf, along with small
motorboats used for transport to hamlets on the canal.
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| sculpted naga, Phnom Da |
The ride to the ruins of old
Funan goes due east for nearly an hour on a canal across flooded plains,
passing Buddhist Khmer and Muslim Chăm villages. It’s not always a straight route either, for the pilot
sometimes has to steer around places he already knows are too shallow for the
boat to get through. Local peasants
may be standing at spots in these plains, the water at most knee-high in the
dry season, casting fishing nets or even planting rice or vegetables. The plots may be marked off by
low-rising mud dikes. Egrets fly
over and dive for small fish.
Occasionally the land off to one side or the other rises slightly above
the water level and is host to a collection of houses and a temple. Aside from the temples, which are
historically a relatively recent phenomenon, the landscape observed on the boat
ride to Angkor Borei probably closely resembles that of the entire Mekong Delta
area two thousand years ago.
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| Ashram Maha Russei |
Not much remains
of Angkor Borei’s ancient splendor, other than remnants of a wall, a moat and a
couple water tanks. Its original buildings
were made of wood and have all perished.
However, the boat makes a stop at a small river island about 20 km from
Angkor Borei. Two buildings stand
here that give us an idea of what religious architecture looked like towards
the end of the city’s heyday. The
older of these is Prasat Phnom Da tower, dedicated to Shiva, atop a small hill
and visible from afar, made of brick and stone.
Only one of the doorways on each of the four sides opens to
the interior, where lay a few housings for the linga that were originally
installed. The other doorways are
false, but flanked by sandstone columns, decorated with carvings and sculptures
of rishis (Hindu holy men). Arching over the top of the door was a
decorative tympanum, but only traces of the friezes remain, mostly the
multi-headed nagas at the
corners. Most of the top part of
the tower has crumbled, so it is not possible to guess at how ornate it might
have been. Yet with its square
base, height, architectural elements like the false doors and decorations, this
tower, dating from late 6th or early 7th century, could
almost be a prototype of the Chăm towers that began appearing in south central
Vietnam not long afterwards.
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| typical house,in the village below Phnom Da |
The other temple in the area
is the Ashram Maha Russei, made of gray laterite stone in the 7th
century and dedicated to Vishnu.
It’s rather small, wedged into the slope near the base of a mound, in
three distinct sections, but without carved embellishments. The entrance to the interior altar is
so narrow only a single devotee can enter at a time.
Buddhist temples must have
existed in the area by then, for museums today hold Buddhist sculptures from
the period. The religion began
penetrating the area from the 4th century and was popular with the
urban merchant class, as in its native India. Local Buddhist scholarship developed and near the end of the
5th century two Funan monks, Mandrasena and Samghabara, moved to
China, where they lived several years translating sutras from Sanskrit into
Chinese.
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| Hindu deity, Angkor Borei Museum |
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| Funan Buddha, Angkor Borei Museum |
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| Funan sculptures, Angkor Biorei Museum |
Maritime trade made the area
called Funan wealthy. But it was
Indian influence that gave the culture its prime identity, with a religious
bent far more complex than traditional animism, a code of law based on ancient
precedents, a writing system (Sanskrit) that provided the basis for an
indigenous (Khmer) alphabet, and a class basis for society that assigned people
their positions, as well as their rights and duties. But the strict Indian caste system did not become part of
Khmer or Mekong Delta culture.
Brahmins had privileges as the religious class and royalty and military
commanders came from the martial class, but among the rest no special taboos or
notions of impurity regulated relationships between people of different classes
and occupations as they did, and still do, in India.
In the 7th century
maritime trade routes began altering, relying less and less on the coastal
ports identified as part of Funan and more on direct sailing from Indonesia to
southern China. The wealth and
influence of the coastal area rapidly eroded as political power shifted inland
to new centers in the Cambodian heartland. Yet the cultural parameters already established in the south
continued to shape the new Khmer polities that arose from the 7th
century. The main difference was
that these states, culminating in the Khmer Empire, would be much more
sophisticated, organized not around seaborne commerce, but rice-based
agriculture. All other aspects of
the state and society had their roots in Funan.
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| contemporary Angkor Borei |
The defunct state not only
influenced its successors in Cambodia.
Chăm kingdoms in central Vietnam, though of unrelated Austronesian
origins, modeled their realms on Funan as well, culturally, politically and
economically, continuing to absorb influences from Funan’s Khmer successors
long afterwards. Unlike the latter
states, though, the Chăm kingdoms’ success and power mainly derived from
maritime commerce. They were
ideally situated to take advantage of the shift in seaborne trading routes
after the 7th century.
In this sense, even more than Chenla or Angkor, the Chăm kingdoms were the
genuine offspring of the state of Funan.
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| 8th century Chăm towers near Phan Thiết, Vietnam |
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