46 EARKY INDO-CHINESE INFLUENCE 



insignificance. Traces of its influence have been detected^*^ in the 

 aboriginal dialects of the Kolarian tribes in India as well as in the 

 dialects of independent tribes within the limits of what is now 

 the^^ Chinese Empire, and though the subject is one of very 

 remote historic interest and has only been partially explored, it 

 seems pretty clear that the Mon-Annam family was formerly a 

 very important and widespread group, which has left the marks 

 of its presence in many parts of South-Eastern Asia. Certain^^ it 

 is that in the early centuries of the Christian era the Mon-Annam 

 races of Pegu and Camboja were the dominant races of Southern 

 Indo-China and became eventually the main channel through 

 which Hindu civilization and the Buddhism of India and Ceylon 

 were communicated to the other and more backward Indo-Chinese 

 races, the Burmese and Siamese, who had not then made their way 

 to the southern seashore but dwelt inland while the Mon-Annam 

 races held the coast Ime.^^ It is therefore in no way surpris- 

 ing to find traces of their widespread influence as far south as 

 the Malay Peninsula. Ketreating, as we may imagine, in pre- 

 historic times, before the advancing inroads of Aryan invaders in 

 the Ganges valley and the increasing pressure of the growing 

 power of the " Middle Kingdom," which was then developing 

 into the Chinese Empire, the Mon-Annam races no doubt 

 concentrated their main forces in Indo-China, where after 

 centuries of obscurity some of them, under the teaching of Hindu 

 immigrants, developed the flourishing civilizations of Pegu and 

 Camboja, while an important eastern branch, the ancestors of the 

 Anuamese, falling early under Chinese influence, founded the 

 half-Chinese state of Tungking, from whence they eventually 

 spread into Annam and lower Cochin-Cbina. 



\Vhat then could be more natural and more consistent with 

 ihe facts now under consideration than to believe that from the 

 south of the Indo-Chinese mainland where the ruins of their 



30. Mason, Burraah, 1st Ed. ; Eorbes, Languages of Further India 

 pp. 33, 140. 



31. de Lacouperie, ojj cit, pasiim. 



32. Forbes, op. cit, pp. 21, 150, etc, 



33. Exception must of course be made of the strip along the Eastern 

 and South-Eastern coast, which comprised the Kingdom of Champa and was 

 eventually absorbed by the encroaching Chinese and Annamese. 



