Chin Lin

In the 3rd century CE, Fan Man, king of Funan, attacked more than ten kingdoms across the sea, among them Ch'ü-tu-k'un, Chiu-chih and Tien-sun (Tun Sun). He then turned against Chin Lin, according to the Liang shu in the translation Briggs took from Pelliot. G. H. Luce read the campaign as a move to outflank Chin Lin by taking the trans-Kra Isthmus route, a reading Wheatley reported while surveying opinion on the location of Tun Sun. The same passage ends with Fan Man falling ill before he could subdue Chin Lin. Briggs took Chin Lin to have remained unconquered, and free of Funan.

The city "Balangka, an inland town" (บลังกา), mentioned in the Geographike Hyphegesis of Ptolemy in the 2nd century, has been assumed by Thai scholars to have been Mueang Uthong, the center of Chin Lin. However, some identified Balangka with the ancient Nakhon Pathom.

Location

The location of Chin Lin remains unclear. Among the standing problems with the Chinese records, Miriam Stark counts the difficulty of tying their place names to points on the ground. It was first mentioned around 9 – 22 CE during the late Western Han period, a Chinese emperor Wang Mang sent an embassy to visit Chin-lin. Chin Lin is mentioned again in the 3rd century, in the account of the conquests of the Funan king Fan Shih-man in the Liang shu. For its position Briggs relied not on that text but on later ones quoted by Pelliot, which have four kingdoms, among them Ta-k'un (Ch'ü-tu-k'un) and Chü-li, lying 3,000 li to the south of Chin Lin; he added that the identification of Ta-k'un is not established. Pelliot equated Chü-li with Kou-chih, and Wheatley identified both with the Kole polis of Ptolemy, which he located on the estuary of the Kuantan River in Malaysia. Earlier Chinese compilations give a different bearing and a different figure. The Yiwu Zhi states that Jinlin, also written Jinchen, lay rather more than 2,000 li from Funan, while the Waiguo Zhuan places it the same distance to the west of Funan; neither reckons the distance from the isthmian polities. The Funan Ji of Zhu Zhi adds that the country of Linyang (林陽) lay 2,000 li from Jinchen and could be reached only overland, by horse, there being no route by water—an observation that has been read as placing Jinchen inland rather than on the coast—and that its people were wholly Buddhist. The same work notes a monsoon regime in which rain began in the fourth month and ceased in the sixth, with few clear days between. Palmer Briggs proposes that Chin-lin and its southern neighbor, Tun Sun, was the Mon countries. The boundary between these two entities was ill-defined, but probably not far above the present Mergui in Tanintharyi Region. Briggs placed Chin Lin itself outside the Thai side of the peninsula, in the Thaton-Martaban region of Myanmar, following the general identification of it with the Suvaṇṇabhūmi of the Pali writers, and took its territory to include Tavoy. Hall glossed Chin Lin as lower Burma, and reported Loofs as taking it into a cultural zone that reached Funan and was inhabited by Mon-Khmer and Pyu populations. Wheatley, following Braddell, placed Chin Lin around the northern shores of the Gulf of Siam instead. He used that placement against Briggs, who had read the Liang shu's statement that Tun Sun projected into the sea for more than 1,000 li to mean that part of Tun Sun bordered the same shore. Wheatley objected that the region was already occupied by Chin Lin, and took the passage to describe the peninsula rather than Tun Sun itself. Karen Mudar, citing Wheatley's study of 1983, reports the polities of Tun Sun taken by Funan as lying on the shores of the Bay of Bangkok and subordinate to it, rather than on the isthmus.