Place · delta port city · Vietnam
Óc Eo
Also known as Óc Eo — the port of Funan
The excavated port of the Funan polity in the Mekong delta, where Roman coins of Antoninus Pius, Indian carnelian and gold intaglios, Sanskrit inscriptions and Hindu and Buddhist images have all come out of the same canals — the clearest single site of the early maritime exchange between India and Southeast Asia.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 10.250, 105.150
Worth knowing
Chinese accounts of Funan record a foundation story in which a Brahmin named Kaundinya arrives by sea and marries the local ruler Soma, a naga princess. Versions of the same story are told at Champa and in Cambodian dynastic inscription, which is what makes it a charter rather than a memory.
Connections (4)
- Origin of Pitha mythKaundinya–Kambuja tradition
Chinese accounts of Funan record a foundation story in which a Brahmin named Kaundinya arrives by sea and marries the local ruler Soma, a naga princess — Indian statecraft joined to indigenous authority rather than replacing it. Óc Eo, the excavated Funan port in the Mekong delta, has produced Roman coins of Antoninus Pius, Indian carnelian and intaglios, Sanskrit inscription and Hindu and Buddhist images from the same canals. The same marriage story is told in Champa and in Cambodian dynastic inscription, which makes it a charter rather than a memory.
- Trade routeArikamedu
Óc Eo in the Mekong delta and Arikamedu on the Coromandel are the two excavated ends of the early maritime route, and they have the same things in them — Roman coins and glass, Indian carnelian and gold intaglios, rouletted ware. The pottery in particular is diagnostic: the same rouletted dishes turn up at Arikamedu, in Sri Lanka, at Óc Eo and in Java, which is the single clearest archaeological trace of the Bay of Bengal traffic.
- TransmissionAmarāvatī Mahāstūpa
The Buddha images from Óc Eo and the Mekong delta of the fourth to sixth centuries are in the Amaravati manner of the Andhra coast — the standing figure, the transparent robe, the raised hand — which means the artistic model came from the lower Krishna rather than from the Ganges plain. Amaravati's masons were exporting a style across the Bay of Bengal while Nagarjunakonda was still building monasteries for Sri Lankan monks.
- Trade routeThe Chola fleet and the merchant guilds
The Ayyavole Five Hundred and the Manigramam left inscriptions from Karnataka to Sumatra and Thailand, and the archaeology of the route — rouletted ware, carnelian, Roman and Indian coin — runs from Arikamedu and the Coromandel to Óc Eo in the Mekong delta. The guilds are the continuity: states fought over the straits for a thousand years and the same merchant corporations kept trading through all of it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Óc Eo”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.
Open Óc Eo in the repository →