The Sri Lanka Podcast: Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

The Ceylon Press

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PLACES & TRAVEL

The Ceylon Press' Complete Audio Books tell the stories of some of Sri Lanka's most remarkable people, places, and events.

12/14/2025

The Jungle Spice Garden

Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless. Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler, and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of Excel by the best-intended of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was, and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the altar of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient, crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to the State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar. The plantation came with twenty-five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle, though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater safety of Colombo. And, as with all things tropical, the land settled back comfortably into the loving hands of nature, with a sigh, as if all that building and harvesting, planting, and living was in some inexpressible way, a trifling and passing distraction, now best forgotten. But possessing land is habit-forming. And soon enough, our acquisition was followed by the purchase of more acres. And another house. Further acres, once part of the wider estate before Land Reforms decimated it, were incorporated on long-term rents until the estate had more than doubled in size, the various land parcels threaded together by the slimmest of jungle tracks. One large plot was planted with vegetable beds, but lay so close to a misbehaving river that the onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes had little choice but to fester and moulder. Another was set aside to grow sandalwood trees. This, as it turned out, was a poor choice. Glamorous though the trees undoubtedly are, keeping them in the style to which they wish to become accustomed is more complicated even than keeping a mistress in Paris. The slightest variation in water caused sulky dieback. The tree’s high-maintenance root system, which demanded the presence of other plant roots to attach to, meant a continual need to throw what amounted to hedonistic horticultural parties. When all that had been sorted, Sandalwood Spike Disease arrived. An entire valley was planted out with thousands of bananas, all of which succumbed to Fusarium wilt. Lemon grass was seeded on well-drained hill sides, most of which caught fire during the drought. Mushrooms, a great favourite of our auditor, were added - more out of good manners than any genuine attempt to be commercial. The old rubber terraces were entrusted to a horticultural bandit who lacerated the trees to produce quick flows of sap, injuring them for years to come. Terraces of new rubber trees were established. “Harvest the latex,” advised one enterprising land agent, “and move up the value chain.” Make didoes,” he went on to suggest: “the few on sale on the island are all expensive imports.” Greenhouses for tomatoes and peppers were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind fruit only the angriest chef would use. Several acres' worth of nurseries to raise cinnamon, cloves, and erica nuts were built, the tiny plants intended for resale to the local agriculture board, though porcupines, gathering in force for nightly raids, had alternative ideas. As the estate’s plantation workers grew into a small army, supervisors with, it turned out, imperfect circadian rhythms, were recruited to manage and mentor the mildly mutinous troops. On the hottest days, sleeping under the shade of mango trees seemed the only option. One manager, tempted to distraction by thoughts of ill-got lucre, was later to be seen gazing woefully out from behind the bars of the castellated Bogambara Prison in downtown Kandy, built by the British and home to a grisly record of 524 executions, including that of the glamorous Sura Saradiel, the island’s fabled Robin Hood. The only plants that readily seemed to work were spices. Ah – the wisdom of hindsight! The first of these rare flowering marvels was several acres of pepper planted to scramble up nitrogen-fixing gliricidia sticks. The vines proved valiantly resistant to animal attack; they were just glad to throw off long green clusters of pepper grapes. Plantations of clove trees also seemed to flourish, and in one distant corner of the estate, cinnamon, that most magical of all Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices, prospered with a lack of neediness that might move a hardened planter to tears of wonder and gratitude. Emboldened, we tried vanilla. Now, as any spreadsheet junkie might tell you, vanilla is the sure route to becoming an overnight millionaire. As more and more people eat more and more chocolate, cocoa beans have barely managed to keep up with demand, with export prices oscillating between $350 $670 per kilo. Our first crop was interplanted with our sad, and still in-recovery, rubber trees – by Francis, an aged and devoted Catholic plantation worker whose ancestry, once deciphered from a tin box of antique family documents going back to the 1890s, came in part from Scotland. Ever the old-fashioned Scot, Francis was as fond of whiskey as he was of God. Every vanilla cutting was blessed before it was planted, his hand waving the form of the cross across the ambitious little plants. Completing the bedding-in of this new plantation took considerable time, and it became clear that, though shade-loving, the amount of shade they had to endure under the rubber trees was just all too much. Francis set to work, digging up each consecrated plant and transferring them to a new plantation, more open to sunlight, which corkscrewed down to a small pond. But the sanctified plants were no less miserable in their new spot, fighting off fungal rot and periods when the water on offer was either too much or too little. And eventually they were moved a third time, though by now not by Francis, who had left to meet his Maker. In their new position and under the mindful eye of Ananda, now our head gardener, the vines finally prospered. As the first vanilla pods emerged, so too did the late but gratifying realisation that the best jungle gardening to be had was to stick to spices. We divested ourselves of the wilder outlying parts of the estate and focused our planting efforts on the twenty-five acres most immediately around us. By then, their ea...

1h 56m
12/14/2025

Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors

Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out, in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in a proper, functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes a struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; what is most especially worth seeing; and why. Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is remarkably considered by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s authentic and genuine soul. It's heart. This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record of withstanding wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning. But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, administrators, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea. No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods the colonists shipped from the island. Still, given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was significant. Very big. And, the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.” As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out as a Sinhalese citadel, offering shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years it was occupied by the British. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly essential. It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that donkeys could better. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention, for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords, and the unfulfilled promises of passing politicians. Nor is it a mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few, though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall in the city centre built in an almost inoffensive architectural style, offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed with ancient flags, wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios. And then there is the very Sri Lankan approach to specialised products. Every so often, as you travel the island, you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an expertise that dates back to the kings of Kandy, for whom they turned out bowls, ornaments, religious objects, and body decorations. Three hundred years later, the craftsman remains, melting and moulding, designing and decorating, stamping and sealing, engraving and polishing. A surer path to satisfaction is to park your purse and your cravings for new clothes, shoes, phone accessories, or mass-manufactured ornaments, and head for Kandy’s Royal Bar & Hotel. This old walawwa is typical of many of the buildings that haunt the city’s tiny, crowded streets, betraying, with hints of bashful sorrow, the remaining traces of striking 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century vernacular architecture. Walauwas – or mansions are they are called in the West – abound in the city, as Kandyan nobles set up their family residences as close to the royal palace as possible. Proximity is power - but after the king was deposed, this particular force lost its draw, and their city address became of diminishing importance. The city’s greatest walauwe is now The Queen’s Hotel. It was first turned into a mansion for the British Governors, before becoming the hotel equivalent of an ageing maiden aunt, chasing an elusive restoration as an improvised Jane Austen bride might a suitor. It’s an unequalled site, on a corner overlooking both the temple, the lake, and the palace, that makes you want to go round and round the block to take it all in properly. Many other such buildings hide down other city streets, balconies and verandas, screened windows, and opaque courtyards, squirrelled away secretly behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Kandy is nothing if not the most secretive of cities. Its wonders reveal themselves best to those who look most. “Secrets,” noted James Joyce, “silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.” But Kandy’s many secrets, held by old families in lofty mansions high above the city, in the unspoken concerns of the people who walk its streets, may be weary now – but they are most unwilling ever to be dethroned. Like threads you pick at, they unwind from way, way back - to explain almost everything. Here, history is not dead; not even sleeping or dazed. It is instead ever on the lookout. Before you even get to the city’s colonial tribulations, still less its modern-day ones, its deeper history is a still more byzantine tale of competing plot lines in which kings, caste, money, and religion, complete with such complexity as to make the Human Genome Project look like a walk in the park. Its first line of kings from the Siri Sanga Bo family wrested the kingdom’s independence from an older Sri Lankan kingdom. But beset by forcible catholic conversions, fever, and internal strife, they petered out, exhausted and baffled, in 1609, barely a hundred years later. Its subsequent kings, the Dinajara, descended from an aristocratic hill-country family. Du...

1h 9m
12/14/2025

The Great Dynasty: The Story Of The Kings Who Made Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch founded a dynasty that would last over 600 years. Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off recorded Singhala history, despite the first 100 years being anything but plain sailing. Occasional bouts of regicide, lassitude, rebellion and navel gazing aside, the dynasty was as textbook perfect as it could reasonably be expected to be, and Prince Vijaya’s thirty-six successors did all that was necessary to embed, improve, and make dominant the tiny state they had first instituted in the northwest of the land. Not one to sit upon their laurels, and with a flair for marketing well ahead of their time, the Vijayans relaunched their realm barely a quarter of the way through their term, branding it as the kingdom of Anduraupura. They ruled it, according to the later Stone Book or Galpota Inscription, as human divinities, with an almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned by their unusual, holistically philosophical approach to life and governance. Their capital city would become one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities, enriched by cutting-edge industry, resources, structures, administrators, soldiers, and all the other disciplines critical to a prosperous ancient kingdom. Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most, if not all, of the island. To the east and south lay Ruhunurata, or Ruhana, a linked but junior principality founded around 200 BCE by Prince Mahanaga, brother to Devanampiya Tissa, the 7th or 8th monarch of the dynasty, and great-great-great-great-great nephew of Prince Vijaya himself. To the west lay the third, much smaller principality of Mayarata, another linked family fiefdom, said to have been founded in the fourth century BCE by Prince Vijaya’s nephew, Panduwasdev, the dynasty’s third monarch. Like light bulbs experiencing the almost reassuringly familiar power cuts and surges of the current Ceylon Electricity Board, a state company forever preoccupied by internal disputes, both principalities rose, fell and rose again, depending on quite how strong the Anduraupuran king was at any one time. All this was, of course, good wholesome leadership – but it was hardly groundbreaking. Seen from the perspective of the Shang, Hittites, Achaemenids, Ptolemaics, the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas, and other numerous successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations with sound hegemonic hereditary rule. It was only halfway through the span of the Vijayan rule that, in welcoming to the island, Mahinda, the Buddhist son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, they did something that changed everything. In this, their simple act of hospitality, they were to remodel their kingdom to be so profoundly different to any other, anywhere, as to endow it with an authority and energy so inimitable that, even today, it is protected and characterised by that misty encounter of 247 BCE. Not only did the Vijayans welcome the young royal missionary, but they also took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with it, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism. Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and, despite later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more appropriately described as a philosophy. In welcoming Mahinda, the Vijayans crossed the line from standard overlords to philosopher monarchs, governed by a formidable moral code and a preoccupation with achieving a state of transcendent bliss and well-being. If being an island was the first and foremost explanation for why Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, Buddhism is, of course, its second explanation. And a much more impressive one too, for it was a deliberate act – one that no less comprehensively than geography was to profoundly colour the country as if it had been dyed in Tyrian purple itself, that ancient and legendary dye, reserved by threat of death, for the clothes of the Roman emperors or the sails of Queen Cleopatra’s royal barge. Of course, not every king or subsequent island ruler made the moral imperatives of Buddhism their magnetic north. However, most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings as they are still today by ordinary citizens in towns and villages across the land. For however ordinary Sri Lankans are, they are also unexpectedly religiously minded. Religion today, to the astonishment of many observers, is holding its own. Right across the world, experts and pollsters have had to rethink their view of what would befall religion as countries modernised. Atheists, agnostics and all who are religiously unaffiliated account for a shrinking 16% of the global population, even if the balance of believers has a whiff of the secular in their spiritualism. But as the West has become more secular, the rest have become less so - with God ever more likely to be best seen by Muslims or Hindus, but not Christians. Nor Buddhists, for Lord Buddha’s followers make up a shrinking 7% of the world’s population. But not in Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is estimated to hold its own at around 70% of the island’s population. Hardly surprising, then, that in repeated world polls, Sri Lanka is almost always to be found amongst the top five most religiously minded countries. Once, most of Asia was Buddhist - but such countries are now a rarity as alternative religions, politics, and secularism have shrunk their reach. Yet in Sri Lanka, Buddhism remains an indisputable force, supported by over 6,000 monasteries, 30,000 monks, and its own government ministry. Other gods retain a modest purchase. Christianity probably arrived sometime after Thomas the Apostle's visit to Kerala in 52 CE, though it wasn't until the Portuguese arrived in 1505 that things really got going. Even so, just 7% of today’s population is Christian, less than the nearly 10% who practise Islam following the arrival of Arab traders in the seventh century CE, or the 13% practising Hinduism, here since even before the Chola invasion of the tenth century CE. Buddhism and Sri Lanka are almost synonymous. It is impossible to understand one without comprehending the other. The Buddhist mindset – that life is one of suffering, only alleviated by enlightenment through meditation, spiritual work and doing good – is stitched invisibly into every fibre of island life. From its earliest beginnings, it has shaped the country’s language and culture, morality, education, politics, family, finance, prosperity, health, work, and its approach to the environment. Presidents, for example, may win elections. Still, they are not taken seriously until they have received the blessings of the Chief Prelates of the Malwathu and Asgiri chapters, the two most critical Buddhist orders in the land. Indeed, so great is the continual rush of ambitious politicians to the doors of both prelates that a traffic-light system might usefully be co...

2h 4m
12/14/2025

The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka

Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world fall short compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, the subject of this podcast. The world’s first Seven Wonders were assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian Diodorus of Sicily, with help from Herodotus, who began the tally 400 years earlier. Their list, focused on the Mediterranean and the Near East, comprised a garden, two tombs, two statues, a temple, and a lighthouse. It featured the Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Sri Lanka’s list, though, is not all architecture with a nod to gardens – it is comprehensive, including a painting, a monastery, a book, a revolutionary new piece of technology that enabled a treasured dish, a shrine, a tree, and a lake. It covers about a thousand years of the island’s earliest period of recorded history, from around 500 BCE to 500 CE. Each item is more than a mere wonder, for each helped set the abiding characteristics of the nation that has been called many magical names before settling on “Sri Lanka “– the Sanskrit words for shining island. This apparent lexical borrowing is no random thing, for Sanskrit, a Bronze Age Indo-European language, is the lexis that has most influenced Sinhala, the language spoken by most Sri Lankans today. And its words, like the clues in an antique detective story, can be traced back to many others in European, Iranian, and North Indian languages. Orphan language, it is most certainly not. Its lexical connections demonstrate the astonishing antiquity of the island’s culture, and the seven wonders explored here connect the country not just to its past but also to its present. Invaded, occupied, plundered though it has been so often, there was ever something inimitably robust and resilient about its culture that ensured the island, with each new renaissance, could draw on the best of its past to inform its future with profound and confident certainty. The story starts, quite inappropriately, where it ends - when the ancient world itself came crashing to a bloody end around the base of a 1000-foot mountain in central Sri Lanka in 495 CE. With it ended one of the most notorious parties the world had yet enjoyed, one that, at 22 years, totally outlasted even Cleopatra’s Feast. The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschilds’ surrealist ball of 1972; more majestic than the Shah of Iran’s 2,500-year dynastic celebrations the year before, this party, like the ancient world itself, raced to its corporeal end with all the aplomb of the last serving of the previous martini on board the Titanic. Of course, 500 CE is little more than a marker, a slender signal, a humble and iconic rounded-up figure invented by historians eager to bring closure to the world of the Romans and Greeks, the Pharaohs, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, or Han. But the date has stuck. Thereafter follows the medieval age, the early modern age. And the later early modern age; even the later modern age, and our own post-modern age, an age shorn of parties, or glamour, decadent or otherwise. Sri Lanka’s 22-year end-of-history party followed exactly the dates of the reign of one of its most outrageous kings, an equatorial Nero with mesmeric hints, like the best of expensive wines, of other things - Vlad the Impaler; Nebuchadnezzar, Louis XIV. In joy, as Mark Twain observed, is sorrow, and Kashyapa, king, party giver, gourmand, and libertine, knew that his moment of doom was due to come sooner rather than later. Gazing across the plains from his high fortress walls in Sigiriya, he would have been presciently aware that his brother would eventually arrive to stop all the fun. And so he did. Commanding a specially recruited mercenary army from nearby India, Moggallana had come to take back what he considered his by right – the throne. The legitimate son of Dhatusena, one of the country’s most fabulous kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after his father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile. But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa played family politics with a cardsharp’s skills. He outmanoeuvred his brother and, with the help of the head of the army, deposed his father, Dhatusena. Had things ended there, we may never have heard of Kashyapa. He would just have been yet another one of the island’s numerous coup d'état kings. But with Oedipian or Macbethian instincts, Kashyapa went further. Much further. He began by entombing his father alive in his palace walls. For so distinguished a king, to be reduced to mere bricks and mortar was a shocking way to end a reign. And, to escape the widespread disapprobation this would have created, Kashyapa abandoned his capital of Anduraupura in much the same way as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri, and headed for Sigiriya. Twenty-two years later, he was to watch his sibling nemesis gather on the plains below him, his army spilling out across the water gardens and pleasure terraces of his Alhambra-like palace. The day was to end with the death of Kashyapa and the extinction of all that Sigiriya stood for - one of Asisa’s most remarkable pleasure palaces; the venue for a lifestyle that made living one long spectacular party. It's like, anywhere in Asia, was probably not seen again until the Kangxi Emperor built the Gardens of Perfect Brightness in the Old Summer Palace, outside Peking, some twelve hundred years later, in 1707. A capital for just one reign, Sigiriya was a cross between the Tivoli, Akhenaten’s Amarna, and the Brighton Pavilion. It enjoyed every last innovation and refinement available – and there were many. The most advanced water technology in the world powers its fountains, lakes, wells, streams, and waterfalls. Artists whose frescos equalled those of the later and faraway Leonardo da Vinci painted their perfumed inhabitants. Nothing was denied it – nothing until the Moggallana denied it everything. The victorious brother returned the seat of government to the old capital, Anduraupura, like some brow-beaten and repentant deserter, ensuring that power was once again exercised with appropriate and demure propriety. Even so, the world that ended in that sibling fight, fought just five years before the official end of the ancient world, would have felt more like a bump than an earthquake to the Anduraupura kingdom’s subjects. Quite what these subjects numbered is the matter of modest academic dispute. It is likely to be fare south of a million – which was the island’s population in 1800 CE. Few though they were, the kingdom’s subjects had, by 495 CE, already chalked up nearly 1,000 years of recorded history since 543 BCE when they began their documented life as a small...

41 min
12/14/2025

Sun Kings: The Story of Sri Lanka's Icarus Dynasty

Far into the north of Sri Lanka, forty kilometres from Anuradhapura to the south, and fifty more to the western seaboard, lie the ruins of a shrivelled reservoir - Kuda Vilach Chiya. The tank is close to some of the country’s most iconic and mythical sites, including the landing place of Prince Vijay, paterfamilias of the nation, the palace of his forsaken native queen, and the country’s first recorded Singhala kingdom. Kuda Vilach Chiya sits on the eastern edge of what is now Wilpattu National Park. Reaching the spot is no easy matter, since it lies within a deep, entangled jungle, for which special permission must be granted to gain access. Even after that, it still requires a tractor to get you any closer to the site, followed by a lengthy walk. For countless centuries, this has been leopard country. Wilpattu’s vast 130,000-hectare wilderness is one of the island’s best kept wildlife secrets, so well off the tourist trail as to exponentially nurture its hundreds of rare species of fauna and flora - along with many endemic species: the Toque and Purple-faced Leaf Monkeys, Golden Palm Cat, Mouse Deer, Dwarf Toads, Hour-Glass Tree and Wood Frogs, Ceylon Jungle Fowl and Ceylon Grey Hornbill. Even the ultra-rare Sloth bear can be seen here, attracted by the sweet golden fruit of the Palu Tree. But despite all these exceptional features, it is for its water that Wilpattu matters most. Its name is more literally translated as the “land of Villu,” “villu” meaning “lakes.” The whole area is pockmarked with shallow rainwater lakes. But the lakes are eclipsed by Kuda Vilach Chiya, a much more deliberate water feature that is hard to make much sense of at first. Today, it amounts to little more than a long, two-to-three-kilometre embankment overgrown with trees and grasses, breached in many places by migrating elephants. It is all that remains of the extraordinary man-made lake that was constructed here sometime after 67 BCE by the first Lambakanna king, Vasabha. Hardier survivors from that time are two masterpieces of ancient aqua engineering, the creation of which allowed Sri Lanka’s builders to construct astonishingly vast water reservoirs. These, in turn, would propel the 500-year-old kingdom into the political stratosphere. The constructions – Bisokotuwas – allowed water to exit a reservoir without placing excessive pressure on the dam embankment, thereby preventing it from collapsing. As a result, the size of the reservoir could scale to unprecedented levels, water in unimaginably enormous quantities could be collected to extend agriculture, support ever larger and more urban populations, and produce crops whose surplus would rapidly and exponentially enrich the young state. The Bisokotuwas at Kuda Vilach Chiya are precision-made structures; the stone slabs used on the inner face fit so perfectly together that there is no room for even the smallest weed to grow. Rising above it, the sluice tower itself can still be seen, part of the same remarkable lost laboratory of water. The same Lambakanna king, Vasabha, is also credited with the construction of the Mahavilach Chiya Wewa, a tank barely five kilometres from Kuda Vilach Chiya, with a storage capacity of 2,400 acres, which is still a key part of modern Sri Lanka’s water infrastructure. Quite why two such large tanks were built so close to one another is a mystery. But their very existence, and that of the Bisokotuwas that made them possible, is the point that matters most. The area around Kuda Vilach Chiya, though remote even by Sri Lankan standards, bears the impact of multiple significant historical events. Not for nothing was it chosen for its capacious reservoirs. It was once a place of some importance. Ten thousand years earlier, and thirty kilometres north, are hypnotic Neolithic cave paintings at Tantirimale. Two hundred or so years earlier, the local temple, Thanthirimale Rajamaha Viharaya, marked the spot where the sacred Bo tree rested as it travelled to Anuradhapura from India under the protection of the Indian Emperor Ashoka’s daughter, Sangamitta. Some historians even believe that the site was once home to the lost kingdom of Panduvasdewu Nuwara, the early Vijayan realm that most immediately predated Anuradhapura itself. A monastery lies on the same site, its excavated gardens littered with stone containers carved to hold gems, and the statues of gods and lions, ruined when the country’s last unitary kingdom fell to invaders in 1215 CE. And in the nearby jungle, ancient monastic caves crouch, decorated with a script that predated Buddhism itself – Brahmi. All around it stretch the flat and softly undulating lands of the country’s massive Dry Zone. Much of Sri Lanka is very dry - as if the land itself had been bled white and hung out to dry. It is not perennially wet like Bangladesh. This is especially true of the Rajarata, the land most immediately around Anuradhapura - stretching from Jaffna and Trincomalee to Puttalam and Kandy - that lay, like Kuda Vilachchiya itself, solidly within the king's control. To achieve anything more than a rudimentary agricultural existence, year-round water was required, and plenty of it. Water, after all, permitted greater areas to be used for growing crops and higher yield densities. It meant food surplus, profit, trade - and with it the capacity to develop an urban and industrial capability, underwritten by technical advances from construction and weaponry to horticulture, and transport. It meant that the state could better develop the organisational and professional skills essential to its success – commerce, industry, engineering, labour, planning, law, medicine, food storage, and finance. Water management and irrigation, water storage and collection, water distribution – all this was what made the Anuradhapuran Kingdom possible in the first place. A defendable island state it may have been, and a centralised Buddhist one at that, but without water it could go nowhere, do nothing, be nothing. This focus on water technology was not a new preoccupation introduced by the first Lambakarnas in 67 BCE. Still, they, more than any other dynasty, ensured the rapid development of the resources and technologies that provided their domain with year-round water. The scattered Vedda and other pre-Sinhalese populations of the island had mastered the construction of small tanks before the fifth century BCE, and, with it, limited forms of agricultural production. This was the start of what is now known as the Tank Cascade system. Rainwater was collected in shallow ponds, and crude distribution methods were used to dispense it. This quickly developed into the construction of low embankments across valleys to dam small rivers or rivulets that would deposit their water into a series of downstream tanks, and, ultimately, paddy fields. Large seasonal rivers were next targeted with dams and distribution channels. Soon enough, a profoundly detailed understanding of how to refine and improve the tech...

1h 30m
12/14/2025

The Jungle Hotel

Encounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind-the-scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course, with a welcome. And thanks for coming our way; most of the readers of this booklet will no doubt be our guests. Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and from everywhere the sound of civets, bickering monkeys that look a lot like Mr Trump; and squirrels bouncing on roofs like Keith Moon. To have made it this far, your car will have navigated our driveway of buffalo grass and untamed forest. Guerrilla gardening, we call it – it keeps at bay, if only metaphorically, what’s best avoided to safeguard a long and happy life: televisions, for example, or processed food, or terrorist warlords. We enjoy being a secret to most and a companion to some. Our sophisticated friends in Colombo call this Village Country, all jungle; tiny hamlets, simple living, feral nature. But really, the jungle is far from feral. What looks so random is ordered, artful, and immeasurably peaceful. Its discreet hills and valleys keep safe a rare seclusion. Nightclubs, branded food concessions, and even a shop selling extra virgin olive oil – all have yet to open here. Somehow, we cope. Nature, good food, schnauzers, art, walks, music, books, yoga, swimming, massage, a few rules, bird watching, tree hugging, meditating, and that most lost of all life’s activities – just being: that’s what this tiny jungle principality is all about. That and the odd trip to a few places well off the beaten track. This little guide will try to give you a glimpse of what makes things tick. And how on earth did we get here in the first place? Geographically, we are neither part of the Rajarata, the oldest kingdom that reached from Jaffa to the edge of the hill country, nor the hill country itself. We lie between the two, on the first high hills that rise from the dry northern plains to eventually reach Mount Pedro near Nuwara Eliya at 8,000 feet. The hotel sits, belly-button-like, in the middle of 25 acres of plantations and jungle that dip down to paddy and up to hills of 1,000 ft, all of it surrounded by yet more hills and valleys, almost all given over to forest. Until family wills and the 1960s land reform acts intervened, this estate was much bigger; a place where coffee, cocoa, and coconuts grew. They grow on still, fortified by newer plantations of cinnamon and cloves, and rarer trees. Now almost 100 years old, the main hotel block, Mudunahena Walawwa, was built by the Mayor of Kandy. Walawwas, or manor houses, pepper the island, exuberant, disintegrating architectural marvels, now too often left to meet their ultimate maker. In size and style, they range from palaces to this, a modest and typical plantation Walawwa with metal roofs, inner courtyards, verandas, and stout columns arranged around it like retired members of the Household Calvary. But it was not always thus. This walawwa – like a caravan - moved to its present site when the water ran dry at its earlier location. The foundations of this first abode, on the estate’s eastern boundary, can still be seen. It overlooks the Galagedera Pass, which found its 15 minutes of fame in 1765 when villagers, fortified by the Kandyan king’s army, rained rocks down on an invading Dutch army that melted back to Colombo: fever, and early death. From that moment on, little happened in the jungle that is. Elsewhere, America declared itself independent, and the Holy Roman Empire dissolved. Wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, and the Cold War beset Europe. Asia threw off its colonial masters. Not even the LTTE civil war that so rocked the rest of Sri Lanka made much of an impression here. In fact, it wasn’t until 1988 that the outside world caught up with the estate when a Marxist-Leninist insurrection weakened the country for three years in a blizzard of bombings, assassinations, riots and military strikes. Entrusting the Walawwa keys to three old retainers, the family left the estate, and for 20 years, weather and nature took turns budging it into a Babylonian wilderness. Landslides embraced it. Buildings tumbled. Termites struck. Trees rooted - indoors. Later, we arrived on holiday and bought it – a sort of vacation souvenir that could only be enjoyed in situ. No Excel spreadsheet; no SWOT or PESTLE analyses were manhandled into service to help escape the inevitable conclusion, which was, of course, to buy it. The estate and the buildings were lovely; they only needed some love back. The love restoration programme that followed often felt like the unravelling of Denisovan DNA. Expect the unexpected, said Oscar Wilde. Prescient advice in the jungle as much as in Victorian London. There were monks, of course. They arrived to be fed, to bless and leave, their umbrella bearers running behind them. And five or six builders, not dissimilar to Henry VIII’s wives: some jailed, some cherished. There were monsoons, material shortages, power cuts, and work schedules giddily interrupted by alms-giving and wakes. And of course, the Easter bombings, COVID, the bankruptcy and collapse of the government, and shortages of everything from fuel to yeast. But with each cloud came the most golden of silver linings, fostering those most Sri Lankan of virtues - patience and fortitude. As a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic put it: “What comes, will go. What is found will be lost again. But what you are is beyond coming and going and beyond description.” With a wisdom you might expect from one who put up with Genghis Khan, Rumi was right. In the jungle, everything eventually settles back down. Nicely. And so, finally restored, the estate opened as a boutique hotel in 2019, becoming one of the island’s Top, albeit tiny, 5-star hotels. Most hotels start their blubs with room details or menus. This one begins with plants. As befits a jungle hotel, we love them. Especially trees. We have planted almost 8000. The gardens that cradle the hotel include yellow and pink shower trees, frangipani, flamboyant and Illawarra flame trees; coconut, lipstick, and queen palms; mangos, and wood apples. In the outer garden grow cycads, orchids, sapu, Cook and Norfolk Island pines, jak, jacaranda, and tea. Rarer palms too - travellers, foxtail, ruffled, stilt and golden; pomegranates and citrus in force – from lime to kumquats, grapefruit to tangerines. Small paths crisscross the estate with four easy walks laid out in the Garden, the Outer Garden and a half or full estate walk, with a fifth taking you further into the jungle and nearby hamlets. Down one of these paths is our private Spice Garden planted with cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cloves, turmeric, and ginger; nurseries of herbs, vegetables and rare saplings, the Elephant Graveyard, and a grove of cocoa. Beyond all this stretch the plantations where the jungle is kept at bay with ever more deliberate degrees of lassitude. Deliberate – because that’s what the wild creatures demand in most surveys we have carried out. Birds especially. Over 200 species breed on the island, including 33 endemic species. We have counted over 50 species here, including kites, eagles, peacocks, parakeets, o...

35 min
12/14/2025

And That's How It All Began: Sri Lanka

It took a refugee from Nazi Germany, with an interest in economics and Buddhism, to note the singular connection between two of the most apparent characteristics that distinguish Sri Lanka. “Small,” remarked E. F. Schumacher in his eponymous book in 1973, “is beautiful.” It was economics, rather than Sri Lanka, that Schumacher had in mind, but, as with all seismic observations, his simple statement lent a formative new way to understand previously inexpressible truths. Sri Lanka is both small and beautiful. So small, in fact, that it could fit into India 50 times, into Britain almost 4 times, or even into Peru nearly 20 times, its nearest neighbour, Tamil Nadu, could accommodate it twice over, with land to spare. Head a little further north, and 10 times as many people crowd into nearby Pakistan, or six more into Bangladesh. Schumacher’s only other book, published on his deathbed in 1977, “A Guide for the Perplexed”, is a study of how humans live in the world – but it could easily have lent its title to a mandatory guidebook for issue to every person who passes through Bandaranaike Airport, citizen or guest, VIP or economic migrant. For little about the island is straightforward, despite or because of its size and beauty. Confronting it for the first time is like encountering Rubik’s Cube for the first time, that infamous multi-coloured rotating brick toy whose coloured ends seem so easy to organise into blocks. The outcome, though satisfying and apparently almost effortless, remains virtually impossible to achieve. Just below the surface of almost everything on the island, and simmering with delight, richness, chaos, or just plain thwarting befuddlement, lies the complexity of what is quite possibly the most byzantine and bewitching country in the world. The more you see, the more you wonder. Why? Why, for example, make a simple presidential election quote so convoluted and full of enough own-goal traps to risk making the spoiled votes equal to the good ones? The 2024 presidential election brought almost 40 candidates forward for a preferential-style vote so complex that the Election Commission had to issue a 200-word note on how to correctly mark the ballot paper. But perhaps this is to worry unnecessarily, for the country’s political system has, as horse riders might note, plenty of form. By 1978, when the current constitution was adopted, it had already enjoyed three earlier ones, roughly one every 16 years. Now regulated by this, its second constitution since independence, Sri Lanka possesses a governing document of such elastic resilience that it has undergone an average of one significant amendment every second year and has still survived. Such political robustness is nothing less than what should be expected of an island whose circuitous history meanders through over 2,500 recorded years to take in at least 12 former capital cities, as many, if not more, kingdoms, and 300 recorded kings, some half of whom were estimated to have murdered the other half. Conundrums, reversals and the sudden appearance of polar partisan opposites have riotously followed almost every step of that wild journey. The kings eventually made way for the world’s first elected female head of a modern state when, in July 1960, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected Prime Minister. Yet in 2018, a new President reimposed a four-decade-long ban on women buying alcohol. Given that barely 6% of the country’s supreme law-making body, its parliament, is filled with female MPs, this institutional sexism is understandable – but to fully explain it, one needs to look little further than the fact that just under a fifth of all MPs have just one A-level to their credit. But there’s much more to the rule of law than exams. Should parliament depress you, look to the country’s Supreme Court, a focused and resilient body that has thwarted attempted coups and power grabs through the decades. “Do I contradict myself?” asked the American poet, Walt Whitman. “Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.). And so too does Sri Lanka. Despite Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Booker Prize-winning writers, and architects who have profoundly reshaped how people live across the tropical world, its best universities barely scrape into the top 1,000 worldwide, with a pedagogy that deliberately fails almost half its students. Honest domestic consumers eager to pay their electricity bill must first correctly guess which of 8 categories they fit into before they can pay up, proof, if ever it was needed, that here at least there is little pleasure to be had in being a consumer. Used car prices have more than doubled in the past few years, and at any given time, eggs, onions, rice, milk powder, or even turmeric have entered an Alice-in-Wonderland world, priced well out of reach of ordinary people. Yet still the kiribath is made. This dish, of coconut-flavoured milk rice, is unique to the island, the muse behind Anuradhapura’s Kiribath Stupa, a monument of almost unimaginable antiquity that once was said to house the sacred tooth relic itself: the left Canine tooth of Gautama Buddha. The snack itself never fails to delight, a comfort food that pushes Butter Chicken, Shepherd's Pie, spaghetti or chocolate brownies to the back of any gourmet’s fridge - yet seems but a demure option in a national cuisine enriched by visitors that stayed too long - Portuguese love cakes, Dutch lamprais, Lisbon pumpkin preserve, deliciously crispy yellow deep-fried Amsterdam koekjes, Tamil dosas, idlis and vada, roast paan, Keralan hoppers, English fish cutlets, Christmas cake, brown Windsor soup or tea itself. Given the island’s history, it is no surprise that so many national resources should be devoted to the health care of its people. The remains of at least five ancient hospitals are found among Anuradhapura's oldest ruins, and with them the tantalising Brahmi inscriptions of two physicians from the second century BCE. King after king built and enlarged the hospitals across the land and endowed them with revenue. One even built a hall for several hundred patients, each to be attended to by a slave. The third-century CE king, Buddhadasa, was so committed to health that he even took to doctoring himself, curing snakes and monks alike. Today, the nation’s free universal Western health care system is among the best in South Asia. Even so, patients, feeling some degree of illness, need first to self-diagnose before electing to see the correct doctor, praying all the time, as they hobble towards the hospital, that they are heading towards the proper cure – a fate that eluded a recent government minister who fell ill after spectacularly drinking a ‘miracle’ COVID potion, concocted by a man who claimed to have received its recipe from Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali. Even so, it competes head-to-head with traditional medicine. In village after village, town after town, the ancient medical practices of the land are easily accessible, endorsed by the government, and supported by their own doctors, ministries, training, teaching, and hospitals, curing and alleviating the suffering of thousands of people daily. Nothing is really what it see...

1h 1m
12/14/2025

A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera

And we start with a little bit of retail therapy, which will take you down one of the world’s busiest high streets. And if you wonder about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the world; marvel instead - because, yes, you have come to Galagedera, the first highland village you encounter as you drive from the immense dry plains of northern Sri Lankan into the Central Highlands. Here, at 1,000 feet, the Galagedera Gap stretches out, where in 1765 the Dutch Army were defeated by soldiers of the Kandyan king. Stones rolled down onto the army from the adjacent hill. The Dutch sued for peace, returned to Colombo, and accepted defeat. Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As the retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalisation and changing consumer habits has made only the most modest of footprints. Within the next 30 years, this will surely change - but for now, to travel down its length in a tuk-tuk is like time-travelling in the Tardis. Once upon a time, your village looked a little like this. The tour may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no chance of breaking for a martini, still less an almond croissant – but no matter. Behind Galagedera’s busy frontages are nearly all the things that most people need most of the time: on their doorstep and not concealed behind knotty road networks in gloomy retail parks. Galagedera High Street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and businesses on either side, beginning on the left as you slip out of the gates of the Flame Tree Hotel and set off down the Rambukkana road. At almost any time of the day, it brims with pedestrians and traffic – especially other tuk tuks. Pause and watch. People talk. They pause and gossip, trade news, and they know one another. Amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fishmongers and butchers, woodcarvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, there is a wide range of businesses and services. LEFT OUT OF THE GATES, and it is the hospital you arrive at first, an agreeable village example of the free and universal health care system enjoyed right across the country. Sri Lanka’s health system has had a seismic impact on national life, improving life expectancy and dramatically reducing maternal and infant deaths. It runs parallel to paid-for private health care, offering faster and sometimes more advanced treatment. And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system supported by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching colleges, and a bespoke government ministry. Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and admits around 20 patients to its wards, cared for by around five doctors and 40 nurses. Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care, and maternity care are all provided, but more complex cases and conditions are referred to the central state hospital in Kandy. This includes, on average, 10 snake bites per year, but not scorpion bites, which can be treated locally. Colds, flu, and road accidents are all typical of its challenges – but so too are people injured by falling off trees or being hit by falling coconuts. Next up is the village’s central bus station, which receives buses to and from Kandy or Kurunegala throughout the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate's Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide, and a short walk from the village’s large police office, one of 600 nationwide. Close at hand, and convenient for a tidy court appearance, is the village’s tiny handloom workshop: authentic looms being worked by real people to produce lovely, patterned fabric. Further along is the Galagedera Primary School and the Sujatha Girls School. Founded in 1906, this is the only girls' school in the area, teaching around 1,000 pupils from first grade on. The village’s primary school, Galagedera Central College, is tucked away behind the town. Founded over 120 years ago, this large state school takes in students aged 10 to 18, with about 70 staff members educating 1,000 students. For hardcore consumers, a retail treat comes next with The Global Electrics and Paint Shop, owned by one of 3 brothers, the hardware tycoons of the village. The second brother trades in items such as cement, plumbing, and electrics, and the third in glass. They are a second-generation business family, with the enterprise having started 40 years earlier. Their somewhat surprising neighbour is Green Life, a plantation investment company that specialises in guavas. Given that the fruit, delicious in jams, desserts, and chutneys, originated in South America but has been used in traditional Sri Lankan medicine for hundreds of years, it likely arrived sometime after 1505 with the Portuguese. Guavas are grown mainly in the dry zone, not in the hill country of Galagedera, so this anomaly of an office is a rare and mysterious thing, as much to me as to its manager. Then you encounter one of the village’s great retail treasures: the Ayurveda Medicine Shop. Once little larger than a wardrobe, this enterprise has ballooned over the past 8 years and sells over 100 different pungent herbs, made up to whatever prescription the customer presents. Amongst its many wonders is devil’s dung. Made from the dried latex of carrot-related plants from central Asia, this curious version of Asafoetida finds greater favour amongst cooks than patients for the smooth onion-like flavour it bestows with generous grace to any dish to which it is added. The village boasts a branch of Durdans Laboratories whose range of basic medical tests often saves a longer journey to the leading hospitals in Peradeniya. The chain began in 1945 and is one of several leading private health care providers, such as Lanka Hospital and Asiri. The village, being about 40% Muslim, naturally boasts its own mosque, this one a large white and green structure, whose Imman’s call to prayer, a welcome musical improvement on the previous incumbent, can be heard daily across the jungle. Sri Lanka has well over 1 million tuk-tuks on its register, so it is no surprise to find several 3-wheel garages in the village, one of the better ones being New Chooti Motor Centre. Most tuk-tuk drivers are careful and law-abiding souls; even so, the vehicles account for almost 4,000 road incidents annually, nearly 8% of them fatal. As the row of shops thins out on the left, you pass the Government Vet, their animal mandate including the usual tally of cats and dogs, but also sizable numbers of goats and some 100 weekly out calls for cows. Nearby is the Hanna Gold Shop, one of several tiny gold shops in the village, who...

51 min
12/14/2025

A Garden Companion To The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel

“Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.” Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens were. Plants. And especially trees. For it was gardens, not love, that occupied my childish imaginings. Gardens, I concluded, were all variants of a single standard – the best example to be found amidst the faultless flower beds of the governor’s house, in Madras, the Raj Bhavan. This was a proper garden. Built in the 1670s, its regimented perfection even extended into a deer park, whose trees were as disciplined as they were well-mannered. Of course, it helped that armies of gardeners tended them, but of these unsung heroes, little was ever said. Later, when I saw Versailles, it all came together. Gardens were actually houses, albeit with green bits. Over the years, I tested this theory: in window baskets overlooking Scotch House Corner, on Bayswater balconies, Welsh seaside cottages, and Oxfordshire villages. It seemed to hold. Until, that is, we set about gardening in the jungle. We had bought, incautiously and without any help whatsoever, a 25-acre Plantation north of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. It had been abandoned during the JVP uprisings. It's 1,000 high rocky hills stalled a Dutch army in 1765, and until the civil war, the estate stretched over 100 acres with three working elephants. When the estate agent had closed the deal, the estate had been reduced to 25 acres and a bewildering number of buildings, all of them as unstable as a Sunday morning drunk. Trees grew in rooms; animals lived on shelves. And rapidly, I realised that the real world was precisely like my childhood definition of a garden, only the other way around. Limitless green forest with the odd house attached – and forever fighting an unsuccessful campaign to keep nature at bay. Earth Org, the environmental news website, agrees, stating that despite the interminable assaults made upon it, nature is still the boss. Just 20% of Earth's land surface is either urban or farmed. So our jungle gardening is undertaken modestly, with the lightest of hearts, the boundary between wild and tamed conveniently blurred so that excesses on either side are easily tolerated. It’s a green version of the balance of power and an opportunity to see Nudge Theory in practice. Even so, this estate, having been abandoned for twenty years before we bought it, had sided a little too firmly with the jungle. The balance of power was extravagantly unbalanced. The estate road was undrivable; the plantations had become savage forests, and trees grew in its courtyards and buildings, guests occupying superior VIP suites. Pushing these boundaries back was like sailing down the Nile: a slow voyage, with plenty of opportunities to become distracted by everything that happens when you blink. But slowly, slowly, our gardening team reclaimed parts of the interior and created four different walks to take you around most of it. Some areas remain wild, unvisited for a decade at least, cherished no-go zones left to shy lorises and civets. Of these four walks, the gentlest of perambulations is The Home Garden Walk. This stroll begins just outside the main hotel office and porch, with both buildings shaded by THE PARROT DAKOTA, a tree named after New York’s towering Dakota Apartments. This Sri Lankan Dakota version is no less a Renaissance creation – a Java Cassia, or to give it its common name, The Pink Shower Tree. Flowering with puffs of Barbie pink clouds in April and May, it fruits and sheds its leaves in December. Our specimen is over 120 years old; its hollows and defensive height make it our leading parrot apartment block. Amongst its many tenants are rose-ringed, plum-headed and Layard’s parakeets – three of the world’s 353 parrot species. Layard’s parakeet is easy to spot, as it has a long, light-blue tail, a grey head, and a fondness for sudden, prolonged screeching. The green-all-over rose-ringed parakeet is a giveaway too - with a bright red beak and the slimmest of head rings. But the most striking is the male plum-headed parakeet. He is a stunner, his proud red head offset with purple and blue feathers. He would turn heads in any nightclub. Two other parrot species live on the island but have yet to be spotted here: The Alexandrine parakeet is similar to the rose-ringed parakeet, only much larger. It’s a bit of a city dweller. The other, the sparrow-small, endemic Sri Lankan hanging parrot or lorikeet, is a rare creature: a twitcher’s crowning glory. All these birds can be found in G. M. Henry’s celebrated 1958 Guide to The Birds of Ceylon, which sits in the hotel library, together with some of his original watercolours. Henry was one of the last great ornithologists – the sort you would fight to sit next to at dinner. A discoverer as much as a describer of species, he wrote extensively about the island’s wildlife. Born on a tea estate in Sri Lanka in 1891, his bird guide is remarkable not only for its comprehensiveness but also for its entertainment. His descriptions are unforgettable and funny; of the lorikeet, he remarks, the bird is not simply another parrot but a convivial and restless one with highly ridiculous breeding habits. Reading his identifiers, you almost feel you have met the bird concerned at a party, conference, dentist’s waiting room or orgy. Close to our blushing Cassia is KASHYAPA’S CORNER, a small garden of Frangipani trees, named for the anonymous 5th-century mistress of Kashyapa, the king who built the Sigiriya pleasure palace, where he partied for 22 years before being murdered. Its frescoes show her holding the wickedly fragrant frangipani flowers – wicked, because, despite lacking nectar, their dreamy scent tricks moths into pollinating them. Arguments rage gently over whether there are 20 or 100 species of the tree, but none of this matters in Sri Lanka, where temple-goers have so eagerly adopted the plant that it is called the "Araliya" or "Temple Flower Tree". South American by origin, it spread around the world on the backs of gardening missionaries. However, this does nothing to explain how its flowers came to be depicted over 1500 years ago in Sigiriya. A small tree, rarely more than 20 feet high, it flowers in shades of red and yellow, white, and peach; and even when bare, it is as close to an architectural marvel as any tree can get. Stretching out beyond KASHYAPA’S CORNER is a croquet lawn, instead unwisely planted with Australian grass for its smoother velvety feel, but continually under siege by the more rampant and feisty Malaysian grass, which possesses the invasive qualities of pirates. A much-sheared golden dewdrop hedge surrounds it; the plant is liberally tolerant of the hardest pruning and has become something of a poster girl for tropical topiarists. Growing through them are a few dozen stately Queen Palms. We call them DONA CATHERINA’S PALMS, after the island’s most beguiling queen, Kusumasana Devi. Three times tempestuous queen of Kandy (1581 to 1613), Dona Catherina died of grief, outwardly Buddhist, inwardly Catholic. It was her bad luck to be caught up in the wars between the Portuguese and the kings of Kotte and Kandy, and as the last descendant of the original Kandyan kings, she was a...

42 min
12/14/2025

Wicked, Nefarious, Iniquitous: Sri Lanka’s Most Notorious Kings & Queens

The awful thing about wickedness is just how interesting it is. Kind and benevolent rulers; admirable warrior kings; even the fumbling but kindly nice ones who build hospitals and live blameless lives – they all pale into guilt-wrenching insignificance when set before a list saturated by the sinful, iniquitous, and depraved. And in this respect, Sri Lanka is spoilt for choice, simply by virtue of its statistics. Around 200 kings, with the odd queen, ruled the island from its first recorded beginnings in 543 BCE to its last king, who was packed off into exile by the invading British in 1815. From island-wide kingdoms to ones circumscribed by covetous foreign occupiers, the 2358 years of royal rule the country enjoyed were a considerably different experience. It was just as Longfellow had once said of a little girl: “When she was good, she was very, very good/ But when she was bad, she was horrid.” The country’s monarchs averaged little over 11 years a reign, but with massive variances. Most lapped up a rule of just a few years; sometimes, only a few hours. A happy few enjoyed reigns that must have seemed an eternity to their fortitudinous subjects. But if the ancient chronicles are to be believed, almost half of them died well ahead of their divinely allocated time – at the hands of their own successors, often sons, sometimes brothers, uncles or even wives or occasionally an invading Indian emperor or edgy Tamil warlord. No studies have been conducted to precisely identify which country can claim to be the most regicidal. Still, in any future list, only a fool would put money on Sri Lanka not scoring somewhere around the top 5. From this long, bloody start, regicide took a modest back seat during the rule of the Dutch and the British. But things picked up after independence in 1948. Assassination, often but not always fostered by civil war, promoted the killing of a sitting president, a prime minister, and a leading presidential candidate, Vijaya Kumaratunga, whilst another almost killed his own wife, the then president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, in 1999. It was but one of many other fortunately failed attempts at regicide that the independent republic had to face, a trait that reduced, at times, its own leaders to accusing one another of hatching yet more malodorously mortal plots. But selecting just 6 of the country’s most egregious baddies – barely 7% of the total of potential scoundrels - is as tricky as deciding which chocolate to take from an Anton Berg’s Heart Box. The box has an impossibly delicious mix of pralines, marzipan, nougat, soft caramel, coconut, sea salt, orange, Chocolate Liqueur, Nut Truffle, hazelnut, cherry, and apricot. To make it to this list, a Sri Lankan monarch had to be very bad indeed, a real and indisputable villein. The list begins, quite neatly, with the county’s first recorded king. Embodying a prescient creation myth, which, like many of their type, mixes horror and achievement in equal measure, as with going into labour, Prince Vijaya fits the bill perfectly. As Romulus and Remus had earlier demonstrated in faraway Rome, being a founding father often necessitated random acts of abomination and cruelty. And so it was with Prince Vijaya. Even his father heartily disapproved of him. Coming from a royal Indian family said to have been descended from lions, psychologists might argue that the prince never had a chance. Violence was in his nature. But the Mahavamsa, the great ancient Chronicle of Sri Lanka that is rarely modest in praising anything remotely proto nationalistic, pulls no punches when it comes to its paterfamilias. Given its mission (“compiled for the serene joy and emotion of the pious,”) the Mahavamsa had little other choice but to call a spade a spade. “Vijaya,” it begins, as it meant to go on, “was of evil conduct and his followers were even (like himself), and they did many intolerable deeds of violence. Angered by this, the people brought the matter to the king; the king, speaking persuasively to them, severely blamed his son. But all fell out again as before, the second and yet the third time; and the angered people said to the king: `Kill thy son.’” For the king, this helpful request enabled him to kill two birds with a single stone. He chose to rid himself of not just his own son, but of most of his kingdom’s rogues, whilst demonstrating, like the consummate politician he was, blameless clemency. The Mahavaṃsa records how “then did the king cause Vijaya and his followers, seven hundred men, to be shaven over half the head and put them on a ship and sent them forth upon the sea, and their wives and children also.” The problem was exported. The prince sailed away from India and “landed in Lanka, in the region called Tambapanni on the day that the Tathagata lay down between the two twinlike sala-trees to pass into nibbana.” This time, reference (“Tathagata”) to Lord Buddha notwithstanding, the renegade prince wasted little time in smiting most of those whom he first came across. His ruthlessness and expedient mindset can be seen at work in his marriage to Kuveni, a tribal princess, who was herself no stranger to brutality. Piecing together what actually happened on his arrival is all but impossible. Still, from the extravagantly violent tales told in the Mahavamsa, the vagabond prince likely found no empty island – but rather one already well stocked with people who had ordered themselves in tribes, perhaps even miniature kingdoms. To carve out his own domain necessitated fighting, and in this, a marital alliance with a local princess who could help him in the fight was invaluable. In piecing together the ghostly DNA of Sri Lanka’s pre-Vijayan native kingdoms, historians have had to turn to local folklore, Indian epic poems like the Ramayana, and the Mahavaṃsa itself. Still, the picture they present is blurred and fantastical. There was the Ramayana, a half-human tribe founded by the ten-headed demon King Ravana, whose followers have gone down in history as a terrifying lot given to cannibalism. A further tribe, the serpent-like Naga, may exist only in myth, despite references to Lord Buddha arriving among them to settle disputes. The Nittaewo, dark skinned, tiny, and understandably defensive, are a possible third tribal strand, their last members possibly smoked to death. On marginally surer ground are the Yaksha, described by the Dipavaṃsa, the oldest of the island’s three ancient chronicles and which, with support from the later Mahavaṃsa, could have given rise to the Vedda. Archaeogeneticists believe the Vedda are descendants of the original Mesolithic settlers who migrated from India 40,000 years ago. Scattered communities still exist today, an ever more ghostly presence on the island, their bloodlines dissipated by intermarriage. They worship a range of ancient folk deities, as well as mainstream Hindu gods such as Murugan. Ancestor worship and the cult of the dead mark out many of their still-living practices. This was Kuveni’s tribe, and they seemed to live in scattered communities of kingdoms in various parts of the island. Overcoming her first instinct to kill him, Kuveni instead married him, and on their wedding day, she helped hatch a plot to kill her own clansmen. ...

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The Ceylon Press' Complete Audio Books tell the stories of some of Sri Lanka's most remarkable people, places, and events.

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The Sri Lanka Podcast: Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka