#chenla

The last king of Funan was called Rudravarman (according to the Chinese), and in 539 AD, he offered the gift of a live rhinoceros to the Emperor.

It’s not quite clear what happened to Funan after that.  Probably power devolved to many petty kingdoms along the Mekong.

Chenla?

For a long time, it was believed that a kingdom called Chenla (to the north) was to blame.  Chenla, or Zhenla, is another Chinese corruption, but we don’t know what of.

Ma Touan-Lin wrote an account of 7th-century Cambodia, including Chenla, but hundreds of years later, and the thought Funan was an island, so the account is unlikely to be reliable.  (However, one/some of the Funan towns may have been built on an island.)

Chinese sources also mention a King Bhavavarman in the late 600′s.  He may have been descended from Funanese royalty, and married into a Khmer family further inland.

There is disagreement about where Chenla was situated.  Some say it was in the Champassak region, in today’s southern Laos.  But there is no record of Chenla in the inscriptions of the neighbouring Dangrek region.

If Chenla existed, it was probably in today’s Cambodia, east of the Tonlé Sap Lake, and in the Mekong Valley.  It would probably have been a number of principalities rather than a unified state.

The earliest Khmer stone inscription is from 612 AD, at Angkor Borei; it was followed by a veritable “explosion” of Khmer inscriptions.  But none of them mention Chenla, or the equivalent.

After Funan

The people living in the lower Mekong delta & valley in this era were definitely the ancestors of today’s Khmers, and they spoke an archaic form of the Khmer language.

During the 700′s, Java invaded Cambodia and enforced vassal status on the kings.  A Cambodian king (perhaps King Mahipativarman) grumbled that he wanted to have the head of the Javanese Sultan Saliendra on a plate.  Saliendra heard of this, dispatched troops, and cut off Mahipativarman’s head to put on a plate for himself.

Jayavarman II

Near the end of the 8th century, Jayavarman II (probably one of multiple petty Khmer kings) decided to move his capital from the lower Mekong to north of the Tonlé Sap (the Siem Reap region today).