The motives which prompted this eastward movement have been variously connected with religious persecution in India, missionary enterprise, commerce and political adventure.  The first is the least probable.  There is little evidence for the systematic persecution of Buddhists in India and still less for the persecution of Brahmans by Buddhists.  Nor can these Indian settlements be regarded as primarily religious missions.  The Brahmans have always been willing to follow and supervise the progress of Hindu civilization, but they have never shown any disposition to evangelize foreign countries apart from Hindu settlements in them.  The Buddhists had this evangelistic temper and the journeys of their missionaries doubtless stimulated other classes to go abroad, but still no inscriptions or annals suggest that the Hindu migrations to Java and Camboja were parallel to Mahinda’s mission to Ceylon.  Nor is there any reason to think that they were commanded or encouraged by Indian Rajas, for no mention of their despatch has been found in India, and no Indian state is recorded to have claimed suzerainty over these colonies.  It therefore seems likely that they were founded by traders and also by adventurers who followed existing trade routes and had their own reasons for leaving India.  In a country where dynastic quarrels were frequent and the younger sons of Rajas had a precarious tenure of life, such reasons can be easily imagined.  In Camboja we find an Indian dynasty established after a short struggle, but in other countries, such as Java and Sumatra, Indian civilization endured because it was freely adopted by native chiefs and not because it was forced on them as a result of conquest.

The inscriptions discovered in Camboja and deciphered by the labours of French savants offer with one lacuna (about 650-800 A.D.) a fairly continuous history of the country from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries.  For earlier periods we depend almost entirely on Chinese accounts which are fragmentary and not interested in anything but the occasional relations of China with Fu-nan.  The annals of the Tsin dynasty[252] already cited say that from 265 A.D. onwards the kings of Fu-nan sent several embassies to the Chinese Court, adding that the people have books and that their writing resembles that of the Hu.  The Hu are properly speaking a tribe of Central Asia, but the expression doubtless means no more than alphabetic writing as opposed to Chinese characters and such an alphabet can hardly have had other than an Indian origin.  Originally, adds the Annalist, the sovereign was a woman, but there came a stranger called Hun-Hui who worshipped the Devas and had had a dream in which one of them gave him a bow[253] and ordered him to sail for Fu-nan.  He conquered the country and married the Queen but his descendants deteriorated and one Fan-Hsun founded another dynasty.  The annals of the Ch’i dynasty (479-501) give substantially the same story but say that the stranger was called