Kang Tai and Zhu Ying, envoys of Wu, in Funan

The Book of Liang says that in the time of Sun Quan the kingdom of Wu sent the xuanhua congshi (‘officer for spreading civilization’) Zhu Ying and the zhonglang (‘gentleman of the palace’) Kang Tai to the countries of the southern seas; the lands they passed through or heard of numbered more than a hundred, and they wrote accounts of them. They reached Funan in the reign of Fan Xun, the general who had taken the throne after the murders that followed Fan Shiman’s death. They found the people going naked, only the women wearing a garment with a hole for the head, and remarked that the country was fine but its people’s nakedness strange; Fan Xun then ordered the men to wear a wrapped cloth. In Funan they also met the Indian envoys who had come back with Fan Zhan’s embassy to India and questioned them about Indian customs. It was Kang Tai who recorded Funan’s founding legend of Queen Liuye and the stranger Hùntián.

Wu, the Three Kingdoms state of the lower Yangtze, was cut off from the land routes to the west by Wei and sought the goods of India and the West by sea. A Funanese embassy with musicians and local products had reached Wu in 243, and the mission of Kang Tai and Zhu Ying was followed by a series of embassies from Fan Xun to the Jin court between 268 and 287. Some scholars connected the mission with the officers whom Lü Dai, governor of Jiaozhou, sent south in 226–231, but since the envoys visited the kingdom of Fan Xun, who came to power after Fan Zhan’s embassy of 243, Paul Pelliot and later historians date it to about 245–250. Kang Tai’s Accounts of Foreign Countries in the Time of Wu (Wushi waiguo zhuan) is lost and survives only in quotations in later works, while Zhu Ying’s record of the curiosities of Funan is known only from its title in the bibliographies of the Sui and Tang histories. George Coedès attributed to Kang Tai the earliest description of Funan, with its walled villages and palaces, taxes paid in gold, silver, pearls and perfumes, and books and archives in a script resembling that of the Hu.