Wan Zhen is believed to have been an official of the third-century Wu state (222-280) in south China. His Nanzhou yiwu zhi now survives only in a few fragments in the Taiping yulan encyclopedia, including the three below. The first fragment is the earliest attestation of Kunlun 昆侖/崑崙, a label (derived from an Old Khmer word) that the Chinese would come to apply to various dark-skinned Southeast Asian peoples, including those of Funan and Champa. Note that in Chinese lore, Kunlun was also the name of Mount Kunlun, a mythical mountain in the far west.

For translations of other fragments from the Nanzhou yiwu zhi, see Andrew Chittick’s website Maritime Asia in the Third Century CE.

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The country of Funan is more than thirty thousand li to the west of Linyi (Champa), and its rulers call themselves kings.¹ The lands under its authority all have officials who, along with the great ministers of the king’s court, are all called by the title Kunlun²….

On the coast of Funan there are people like animals, with skin as black as lacquer and teeth as white as undyed silk. They wander about according to the seasons and have no fixed abode. They eat only fish and meat and have no knowledge of grain crops. They wear no clothes even when it is cold and simply keep warm by burying themselves in the sand. They gather in small communities from time to time, their pigs, dogs, and chickens mingling together. Although they have human form, they are no better than livestock….

The country of Geying is to the south of Gouzhi, one month’s travel away.³ To its south, in Wen Bay, is an island called Pulei. On it there live people whose skin is all black as lacquer. Their teeth are pure white, and their eyes are red. Men and women all go naked. 

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1. Funan, a polity known only from Chinese sources, was located in the Mekong delta from the first to sixth centuries CE. Its people were most likely Khmer. Scholars disagree over whether the name Funan (which means “propping up the south” in Chinese) is a transliteration of a local name, a translation of its meaning, or of purely Chinese coining. ↩︎
2. The Taiping yulan preserves a fragment from a lost fifth-century work, the Funan ji (Record of Funan), which states that the ruler of Dunsun (a vassal state of Funan in southern Thailand) was named Kunlun. Du You’s Tongdian (see source 2.13) provides further information on the use of kunlun as a name or title. Du writes, “During the Sui dynasty, the king of this country (Funan) was surnamed Gulong 古龍. Many kingdoms [of the south] have kings surnamed Gulong, and when I asked an elderly man about this, he said, ‘The Kunlun do not have surnames; [Gulong] is just a mispronunciation of Kunlun.’” Du You does not specify whether his elderly informant was Chinese or from one of the Southeast Asian countries. He does provide examples of officials’ titles in the kingdom of Panpan (located on the Malay peninsula) that began with Kunlun or Gulong. The original form of kunlun/gulong is not known with certainty, but is likely to have been in the Old Khmer language of Funan, and was probably kruṅ or kuruṅ, meaning ruler/governor. ↩︎
3. Modern scholars have variously identified Geying as Kollam (in Kerala, India), Coimbatore, or the mouth of the Kaveri River (both in Tamil Nadu). But none of these interpretations is based on any evidence apart from phonetic similarity. Gouzhi is usually identified as modern Takua Pa, Thailand, once known as Takola or Takkolam and a major port on the maritime trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. ↩︎