three chief gods, Po-Nagar, Po-Rome, and Po-Klong-Garai. (Ibid., p. 35.)—­H.C.] The books of their former religion they say (according to Dr. Bastian) that they received from Ceylon, but they were converted to Islamism by no less a person than ’Ali himself.  The Tong-king people received their Buddhism from China, and this tradition puts Champa as the extreme flood-mark of that great tide of Buddhist proselytism, which went forth from Ceylon to the Indo-Chinese regions in an early century of our era, and which is generally connected with the name of Buddaghosha.

The prominent position of Champa on the route to China made its ports places of call for many ages, and in the earliest record of the Arab navigation to China we find the country noticed under the identical name (allowing for the deficiencies of the Arabic Alphabet) of Sanf or Chanf.  Indeed it is highly probable that the [Greek:  Zaba] or [Greek:  Zabai] of Ptolemy’s itinerary of the sea-route to the Sinae represents this same name.

["It is true,” Sir Henry Yule wrote since (1882), “that Champa, as known in later days, lay to the east of the Mekong delta, whilst Zabai of the Greeks lay to the west of that and of the [Greek:  mega akrotaerion]—­the Great Cape, or C. Cambodia of our maps.  Crawford (Desc.  Ind.  Arch. p. 80) seems to say that the Malays include under the name Champa the whole of what we call Kamboja.  This may possibly be a slip.  But it is certain, as we shall see presently, that the Arab Sanf—­which is unquestionably Champa—­also lay west of the Cape, i.e. within the Gulf of Siam.  The fact is that the Indo-Chinese kingdoms have gone through unceasing and enormous vicissitudes, and in early days Champa must have been extensive and powerful, for in the travels of Hiuen Tsang (about A.D. 629) it is called maha-Champa.  And my late friend Lieutenant Garnier, who gave great attention to these questions, has deduced from such data as exist in Chinese Annals and elsewhere, that the ancient kingdom which the Chinese describe under the name of Fu-nan, as extending over the whole peninsula east of the Gulf of Siam, was a kingdom of the Tsiam or Champa race.  The locality of the ancient port of Zabai or Champa is probably to be sought on the west coast of Kamboja, near the Campot, or the Kang-kao of our maps.  On this coast also was the Komar and Kamarah of Ibn Batuta and other Arab writers, the great source of aloes-wood, the country then of the Khmer or Kambojan People.” (Notes on the Oldest Records of the Sea-Route to China from Western Asia, Proc.R.G.S. 1882, pp. 656-657.)