By the mid-first millennium CE, small, local principalities ruled by powerful fami- lies were beginning to coalesce into larger kingdoms. This process is often referred to as “state formation,” but these expanding “circles of power” are better described by the Indian term mandala (Wolters 1982). At the time of Funan, in the first known mandala in mainland Southeast Asia, located in southeastern Cambodia and southern Vietnam, Austroasiatic-speaking peoples were spread thinly across all of what is now
4 Stuart-Fox
southern Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and southern Myanmar. An Austrone- sian-speaking people, the Cham, were creating their own polity along the coast of central Vietnam, while, in the Red River Delta, Vietnamese and Muong speakers had been incorporated into the southernmost province of China.