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 few opportunities for doing so would occur unless voyages from the point of Kambodia to the Malay Peninsula and the islands of the Archipelago, or again from the Straits of Malacca to Ceylon and India had become habitual.

We may conclude with a fair show of probability that the littorals of the China Sea, the Gulf of Siam and the Straits of Malacca were explored by the seamen of China not earlier than the coast-line between the mouths of the Indus and the Straits of Hormuz was skirted by the fleet of Alexander under Nearchus in the fourth century

Again, the unmistakable impress of Hindu influence which is to be detected in the architecture of the Khmers of Kambodia, several of whose buildings date from 200, demonstrates the fact that intercourse between India and Indo-China must have been frequent at a very early period, and such intercourse would almost certainly have been conducted by sea. It has even been accepted by many as a fact that Gauthama Buddha himself visited Kambodia, and if this were so—the matter is one which is hardly susceptible of mathematical proof—it would presuppose communication between India and Indo-China as early as 500

Owing to the fact, already noted, that after the rise of the Muhammadan power the sea-borne trade between western and eastern Asia passed almost exclusively into the hands of Muslims, the first detailed accounts of the sea-route to China come to us from the Arabian and Persian geographers. The earliest Arabic manuscript of this kind belongs to the year 851, and has been edited and translated by M. Reinaud, the French