If the island’s tiny and elite mammalian senatorial class is represented by its elephants and leopards, its more capacious equestrian class comprises its monkeys, lorises, bears, mongooses, buffalo, anteaters, otters, jackals, hares, deer, civets, and wild cats.

Which, of course, leaves the plebs. Bottom of the pyramid, they may have been, but the Roman pleb took nothing lying down. Famed for their resistance, resilience, and passion, they lived their lives with little submission or demureness. They were eminent, not intimidated. As are Sri Lanka’s rodents, whose existence is anything but deferential or docile. And numbering over 30, they make up not just over a quarter of the island’s land-living mammal species, but also 50% of its endemic species. To know them is to understand a key part of what really makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.

Naturally, plebs had a firm pecking order all of their own and at its apex stood the Tribunes of the plebs – the People’s Tribune, which in a mammalian context can only mean the rats. Like tribunes, rats are the busy, brisk, no-nonsense influencers of what really happens or doesn’t, and they abound in Sri Lanka. Their collective poor reputation and cordial hosting of many especially nasty diseases mark them out as a mammal best enjoyed from a distance. However, as  Jo Nesbo observed, "a rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do."

 Two of the island’s ten rat species are endemic. Thirty centimetres in length, nose to tail, with steel grey fur and white undersides, the Ohiya Rat is named after a small village of barely 700 souls near Badulla. It lives quietly in forests and has gradually become scarcer, as biologists have counted. Its only other endemic cousin, the Nilgiri Rat, is no less endangered and is today found only in restricted highland locations such as the Knuckles, Horton Plains, and Nuwara Eliya. Little more than thirty-nine centimetres in length, nose to tail, its fur tends to be slightly redder than the typical grey of many of its relatives. Its name – Nillu, which means cease/settle/ stay/stand/stop - gives something of a clue about its willingness to get out and about.

To these two are joined an embarrassment of other rat species, many common throughout the world, others restricted to South and Southeast Asia, and all much more successful in establishing an enduring dominance. These include the massive Greater Bandicoot Rat and its slightly smaller cousin, the Lesser Bandicoot Rat. Measuring almost sixty centimetres in length, nose to tail, the Greater Bandicoot Rat is known in Sri Lanka as the Pig Rat. Aggressive, highly fertile, widespread, happy to eat practically anything and an enthusiastic carrier of many diseases, it is not the sort of creature to closely befriend. A marginally smaller giant of the rat world is the Lesser Bandicoot Rat, coming in at 40 centimetres in length, nose to tail. It is found in significant numbers throughout India and Sri Lanka, and its fondness for burrowing in farmland and gardens has earned it a reputation for destruction. It can be aggressive and is a reliable host to a range of nasty diseases, including plague, typhus, leptospirosis, and salmonellosis.

The Black Rat, or Rattus rattus, lives in all parts of Sri Lanka and occurs in at least five distinct subspecies: the Common House Rat, the Egyptian House Rat, the Indian House Rat, the Common Ceylon House Rat, and the Ceylon Highland Rat. None is much longer than thirty-three centimetres nose to tail, and despite their reputation for being black, they also sport the occasional lighter brown fur. They are phenomenally successful, with almost every country in the world calling them home, including Sri Lanka. They are also disconcertingly resilient transmitters of many diseases, with their blood serving as a habitat for large numbers of infectious bacteria, including those that cause the bubonic plague.

Three other rats are restricted to South Asia: Blanford's Rat, the Indian Bush Rat, and the Indian Soft-Furred Rat. Indeed, Blanford's Rat, also known as the White-Tailed Wood Rat, is found in impressive numbers throughout India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Measuring thirty-five centimetres in length, nose to tail, it has the classic grey fur of the kind of rat that scares most people. The Indian Bush Rat is also found widely across India and Sri Lanka. It even boasts a tiny pocket-sized colony in Iran. At twenty-five centimetres in length, nose to tail, it is smaller than many other rats. It has rather beautiful fur that is speckled yellow, black, and reddish, as if it had wandered out of a hair salon, unable to make up its mind about which exact hair dye to ask for, opting instead for a splash of everything. The ultimate C List celebrity, the beautiful Indian Soft Furred Rat, is more than happy to make its home at any altitude and almost any place from India, Nepal, and Pakistan to Sri Lanka. So ubiquitous and successful is it that it is listed as being of no concern whatsoever on the registers of environmentalists troubled by species decline. Barely 30 centimetres nose to tail, it has brown to yellow fur on its back and white across its tummy.

The devil of the rat world is undoubtedly the Brown Rat, which boasts a wide range of alternative names all associated either with Lucifer, Satan, Abaddon, Beelzebub, or streets, sewers, or wharves. Immortalised by Dickens, it has been studied and domesticated more than most mammals and inhabits almost every continent of the world, not least Sri Lanka. It is large – over 50 centimetres nose to tail. It is happy to consume nearly anything, is highly social, produces up to 5 litters a year, and, according to more informed scientists, is capable of experiencing positive emotions. A final rat, Tatera Sinhaleya, known only from fossil records, bade farewell to the island many thousands of years ago.

If rats are the tribunes of the mammalian world, then mice are certainly its aediles, a post in the Roman Republic reserved for men responsible for the upkeep of the city, and so, by nature, meticulous, attentive, persistent. Just like Sri Lanka’s seven mouse species, nearly half of which are also endemic. 

The ultra-rare Sri Lankan Spiny Mouse leads these native, endemic, and patriotic rodents. It is now so endangered that it can be seen in only very few locations. A mere maximum of 18 centimetres in length, from nose to tail, its reddish grey back and sides morph into white underparts, with huge, gorgeous, smooth, scooped-out ears that stand like parasols above large dark eyes. It is a mouse to fall in love with.

The similar, and somewhat confusingly named, Mayor’s Spiny Mouse also inhabits the smaller end of the mouse spectrum and comes in two (still quite widespread) variants – Mus Mayori Mayori, which inhabit the hill country; and Mus Mayori Pococki, which prefers the low wetlands. Telling them apart is almost impossible; both are covered with reddish-grey fur and exhibit relatively small ears. Seeing them is also a challenge, for they are both nocturnal creatures. One of their more interesting (albeit worrying) points of mouse difference is their capacity to carry quite so many other creatures: from mites, ticks, and sucking lice to small scorpions.

The last of the endemic mice is the Ceylon Highland Long-Tailed Tree Mouse. Discovered in 1929 by t...

For it was, according to the best of legends, mongooses who were responsible for Kandy being built where it was. The city’s earliest history is an impossible mosaic of hearsay, myth, the odd inscription, and later recollections. First founded as an offshoot of the Kurunegala kingdom sometime after 1357, it lapsed into impenetrable obscurity until Vikramabāhu, a rebellious cousin of the Kotte kings, remade it as his petite capital. But by the time his grandson, Karalliyadde Banḍāra, came to take over in 1551, the wafer-thin royal line had all but petered out in a poorly judged wave of conversions to Catholicism and acquiescence to the invading Portuguese. It was the rise of a patriotic nobleman noted for his machismo, Vimaladharmasuriya, who relaunched the kingdom in 1592 with sufficient vigour to ensure it lasted as an independent state for 223 years.

The king, casting around for the best spot on which to rebuild his capital, has his attention drawn to the threshing ground that overlooks a large paddy field – now the Sea of Milk or Kandy Lake. The threshing ground, his astrologers advised him, was lucky. Safe even - for it was frequented by a white mongoose, a beast that, as everyone knew, was more effective in keeping a house free of rats, mice, snakes, and scorpions than any cat.

And so, all around what is today known as the Maha Maluva, the city grew, as serpentine in shape and arrangement as any of the snakes hunted by the king’s favoured mongooses.

In fact, the particular mongoose the king was drawn to was more grey than white – being the Common Ceylon Grey Mongoose, or, given its non-endemic status, the Indian Grey Mongoose, as it is also known. It is the smallest of the seven mongoose species or subspecies found on the island. The creature was, wrote Rynard Kipling in 1894, “rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry, as he scuttled through the long grass, was: 'Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”.

Kipling’s famous mongoose demonstrated all the attributes of a perfect mongoose. Despite being somewhat shy around people, it is fearless of snakes; its kill strategy focuses on tiring the snake by tempting it to make bites it can easily avoid. Its thick, grizzled, iron-grey fur and neuro-transmitting receptors leave it immune to snake venom, and for anyone living up-country in Sri Lanka, it is a fine companion to have around. 

Herpestes Edwardsii, as the beast is formally known, is little more than 32 inches nose to tail. It lives right across the island, often in pairs, eating fruit, roots, and small animals. It lives for around seven years, breeding twice yearly and producing up to four cubs, who pop out of eggs, like all mongoose babies. Its fur, stiffer than that of other mongooses, is more interesting than the word grey implies, as each hair is ringed with creamy white and black markings that make even stationary beasts look as if they are running with blurred go-faster stripes streaking their whole body all the way down to a long bouffant tail.

There are, in fact, five subspecies of grey mongoose living in India and other parts of South Asia; and whilst Herpestes Edwardsii is the one most seen in Sri Lanka, a second variant, Urva Edwardsii Lanka, has been identified as sufficiently different as to merit its classification as a subspecies unique to the island. Whilst its more Indian cousin lives almost anywhere, the Sri Lankan variant has a marked preference for habitats at 2000 meters or more. It avoids built-up areas in favour of jungle, shrublands and riverbanks. For a time, it also excited scientists with its superior olfactory capabilities, even to the extent of being trialled to detect narcotic drugs in police raids.

Telling the two apart by looks, however, is a challenge even committed mongoose scientists baulk at. So imagine their consternation at having to tell apart the three variants of the Brown Mongoose, two of whom are only to be found on the island. Like Goldilocks with the Three Bears, they have their work cut out. At around 30 to 34 inches nose to tail, the Ceylon Brown Mongoose (Herpestes Fuscus Maccarthiae), the only one common to both Sri Lanka and India, is marginally larger than either the Highland Ceylon Brown Mongoose (Herpestes Fuscus Flavidents) or the Western Ceylon Brown Mongoose (Herpestes Fuscus Rubidior). But there the more apparent differences end. All three species have dark brown fur, black legs, and long black, enviably tufted tails. All three are sights of simple, breathtaking beauty. But seeing them is a challenge, for they are introverted beasts, with a marked preference for deeper cover, dark forests, and, like Greta Garbo, a preference for being left alone.

Identification is much easier in the case of the island’s next mongoose, the Ceylon Ruddy Mongoose (Herpestes Smithi Zeylanicus). Its grey-brown fur is decidedly reddish in tone, and it has a tail that curves sharply upwards at its tasselled tip, where the fur turns to a deep, even brown. Like all mongooses of any variety, it feeds day and night on anything smaller that moves – and often on larger creatures too – like land monitors. Its closest relative is found in India, Herpestes smithii, named for the Victorian zoologist, John Grey, in 1837, with the Sri Lankan variant only being separated in 1852 by another zoologist, Oldfield Thomas.

Although happily widespread, it is pathologically shy, hiding out in the forests and paddy fields, and, under normal circumstances, has a relatively short life. That said, although it rarely lives more than seven or eight years, a Mr W. W. Phillips from Namunukula in Sri Lanka wrote to inform the Bombay Natural History Society (in those halcyon, fallible days when science was a passion shared equally with amateurs) that “the mongoose in question died on the September 8, 1955, aged approximately 17 years and it months. It ate quite well right up to the last day and died peacefully during the night, apparently of old age and /or heart failure.” 

The last of the island’s mongoose, the Striped-necked Mongoose, is the Versace of the mongoose world, for it has been given an outfit by its Maker that marks it out as one of the island’s most striking and fetching mammals. A dark grey head morphs to reddish brown and grey on its neck- before blooming into a heady, grizzled covering of bouffant fur that gets redder and longer the further down the body it goes. A pink nose, black legs and a reddish tail that ends in a curved tuft of black hair make up the rest of this most alluring of beasts. Widespread across Sri Lanka and southern India, it has a sturdy frame and often measures over 35 inches nose to tail, making it the largest mongoose on the island. Its proclivity for calling forests its home can make sighting it a challenge, but it is a sight well worth the effort.

Although all mongooses are famous for their snake-killing instincts, they have a curiously moral side too, endearing and magnetic in a world besotted by luxury. In amongst the byzantine reaches of tantric Buddhism, one particular semi-deified Buddhist luminary, Ratnasambhava, is to be seen holding – or perhaps squeezing a mongoose. The animal is preoccupied with vomiting up jewels of every kind, in an attempt ...

Big, bold, and marvellous though so much of what is immediately encountered in Sri Lanka, more wonderful even than all you might ever encounter here, is everything that at first sight looks most ordinary. 

Running alongside its elephants (the biggest in Aisa); its literature (Booker-winning); its literary (stratospheric); its politicians (megaphone-loving); its recorded history (2,500 years and counting); its leopards (larger than most); its spices (flawless), is a rare penchant for subtlety, the one virtue that – of course - dare not speak its name. 

Such reticence is remarkable. Alarming, pleasing, it is also, as the Apostle Paul might have said, something that "passeth all understanding, an innate national delicacy wrenched from centuries of struggle, sympathy, fatalism, and plenty.

Wherever you look, you are likely to find a trove of detectably undetectable meanings which, however good or grim, are always so engrossing as to ensure that you need never run the risk of living a life so unexamined as to be barely worth living at all.

And so it is with skinks. They are the most model of model metaphors for the country; symbols for a nuanced elusiveness that is much more inspiring than anything instantly evident. So small as to be ignored; so little studied as to be mysterious; so numerous as to be everywhere, they live a life somewhere between heaven and hell, like semi-fallen angels, perfect for always being not what they seem. If that is, they are ever noticed at all. For Sri Lanka’s skinks have a degree of subtleness that propels that immaterial attribute into the outer galaxy.

Like the Mermaid in far-off Zennor, the island’s skinks live in plain sight, far beneath the radar. Never has there been a more perfect creature to win lasting acclaim as the country’s national animal than this, though the awarding of such an honour would, of course, destroy the very reason why skinks should be chosen to win it at all.

Despite owning 1700 different species around the world, skinks are almost as obscure as sea potatoes. More snake-like than lizards, but with legs that no snake owns, with the face of tiny dragons, the agility of squirrels, and the impish intelligence of chameleons, they live all around us, minuscule glittering version of Rudolph Vanentino: sleek, elegant, nimble, and stylish. They can be seen in trees, rocks, grassland, buildings, jungles, scrub, and on the coast. The very antithesis of McDonald’s and every other soulless global brand, of the 31 skinks that call Sri Lanka home, a colossal 85% are to be seen nowhere else but here. 

But a word of warning – for the claim that the island is home to 31 different skink species is to court controversy. Modern science has done its level best to make skink counting almost impossible, given scientists' proclivity for reclassifying anything that ever once moved. Many claim there are 34 skinks here; others, far fewer. It all depends on which monograph or piece of field research can be said to have preceded all others. To make skink appreciation still more impenetrable, scientists have given these petite beasts the most wearisome of Latin names. It is as if some gargantuan global conspiracy born in the Ark itself has plotted to keep skinks out of sight and out of mind. This modest study of island skinks, elaborated here, seeks to repair some of the damage.

Indeed, some skinks do their utmost best to present a rather grungy face to the world, eager to extend and protect their social isolation. The Toeless Snake Skink is an excellent example of this. Despite being well distributed across Sri Lanka, especially in the high forested parts of Kandy, its rather drab black-bronze countenance and complete absence of legs ensure that it is forever overlooked. Taylor's Lanka Skink is no better. Tiny – 43 mm in length and a little more – is endemic and commonplace in areas such as Sinharaja, the Knuckles, Gampola, and Hantana; it is dull bronze with the merest hint of a 5 o’clock shadow down its length. It was named after an obscure Missouri zoologist, Edward Taylor, an honour it shares with nine other reptiles, eleven reptile subspecies, eight amphibians, and a milk snake once rumoured to suck cow’s udders.

Other island skinks, though, are more evidently in the catwalk category. The Common Dotted Garden Skink, happily widespread across Sri Lanka and the Indian subcontinent - even into Vietnam - proves that being common is no deterrent to being quite simply stunning. With its carrot-coloured tail and golden bronze body, it looks as if it has strolled out from the showrooms of Cartier or Bulgari. Indeed, any celebrity empathic enough to adopt one as a pet would have little compunction in not also taking it as a Plus-One to one of the better launch parties to which they are invited. Its striking appearance makes it relatively easy to spot, as does its uncommon size – varying from a tiny 34mm to a titanic 148mm.

Beddome's Skink is another knockout. One of the nicer, albeit unintended, consequences of Richard Beddome setting off for Madras in 1848 to join the East India Company was his discovery of many new species. He was to give his name to a bat, three lizards, a gecko, two skinks, five snakes, a toad, four frogs, five plants, two slugs and a blind worm before retiring to Wandsworth over forty years after he had first made his dreamy adolescent way out east. His collections can still be seen in museums in London, Calcutta and Scotland, the legacy of an admirable naturalist hiding under the cover of an army officer. One of his skinks, Beddome's Skink, is still most easily found right across India and Sri Lanka, a modest 55mm in size and joyfully untroubled by the excesses of the modern world. It has four legs, each with four toes. With the Breton stripe French naval uniform, popularised by Coco Chanel as its distinctive markings, it is well placed at the high-fashion end of skinkdom.

And here it can keep company with Dussumier's Litter Skink. Named for a 19th-century French zoologist, better known for his work on herrings, Jean-Jacques Dussumier’s skink, sometimes called the Litter Skink, is found not just in Sri Lanka but across southern India too, where it lives in most forest habitats below 500 metres. Somewhat solitary and unapologetically territorial, it is a thriving beast of no genuine conservation concern. About 50mm in length, it comes with the most fashionable of appearances. A tapering dark black stipe edges the sides of its body, which is otherwise a speckled bronze, and its tails fade from this into a brilliant tangerine.

Another proven pin-up is Haly's Tree Skink. First discovered in Sri Lanka back in 1887 by an intrepid zoological double act, Haly & Nevill, Haly's Tree Skink later became embroiled in impassioned taxological arguments sparked by sightings of what was thought to be endemic to the island but later found in various parts of India. For decades, the argument went back and forth: it was endemic. No, it wasn’t. Currently, the consensus seems to be that it is – the Sri Lankan variant being sufficiently different to its Indian cousin as to be considered a separate species. But the debate, rather like a grumpy politician in opposition, is bound to explode again, fed by thirsty new findings. Bearing four feet and four toes on each limb, at a colossal 80mm, i...

New money, old suspicions, religious strife, Persian mercenaries, joined in time by Tamil ones and the grim genie of regicide, now well out of the bottle – all conspired to make the next 167 years look like a battlefield over which no one could claim victory.  The years that lay ahead divided into some 4 phases. The first, rapid and remorseless, lasted just 3 years, from 524 to 526 CE, and saw all 3 kings who reigned during that time murdered. A corrective time of stillness came to replace this moment of national trauma. For over 80 years, from 526 to 614 CE, 7 kings reigned, only two of whom were murdered. A killing carousel followed this for 598 to 640 CE, over 42 years, 5 kings reigned, four of whom were murdered, and one of whom won and lost his crown three times before he was murdered. The last phase was a chaotic coda. Over its 41-year stretch 5 kings were to rule as the country plunged further into civil war, a war which claimed the final king as its last murder trophy.

As the corpse of the king Kumara Dhatusena smouldered on its poetic bonfire, a fate the grieving king himself had brought on when he flung himself onto the funeral pyre of his great friend, the poet Kalidasa, he may have falsely hoped that, in the poet’s words. 

“Yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today, well-lived, makes
Yesterday, a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow is a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

 But it was no new dawn that saw in his successors' reign. The immolated king was succeeded by his son Kittisena in 424, whose nine-month reign ended with brutal brevity when his uncle wielded the knife and took the throne as Siva II.  Silva was not a lucky name – the previous Silva, a lover of Queen Anula, had managed only one year before being poisoned, and this second Silva fared no better, being killed by Upatissa II, the brother-in-law of the late king Moggallana. Siva didn’t even manage to last a month, his uncertain path to Nirvana happening just 25 days into his reign in 525 CE.

Upatissa too was an unlucky name: the first Upatissa had reigned for only a year back in 505 BCE, and this second one lasted just twenty-two months until 526 CE. Although Upatissa had Moriyan blood, it is thought that he had yet more Lambakarna blood flowing through his veins, and the remnants of this last dynasty may well have supported his grab for power, which the Moriyans had succeeded in. Whatever the truth of the matter, Upatissa was not the horse to back. Described in the ancient chronicles as “old and blind,” he had little energy to devote to his new job. From the beginning, he seemed fully occupied trying to appease a rival nobleman, Silakala Ambosamanera. Silakala was the self-same ex-monk who had brought the Kesha Dhatu Hair Relic of Lord Buddha to King Moggallana. Despite his Lambakarna blood, Moggallana had promoted him to become his sword bearer. 

Upatissa even gave his daughter in marriage to his rival in the hope of keeping the peace, but the gesture failed. Silakala fled south, raised an army and marched back to Anuradhapura. The city lay under the protection of Upatissa's own son, Giri Kasyapa. Still, the young prince, realising that the forces surrounding him were unstoppable, fled at night, taking with him his elderly parents and the royal regalia. But in this, he failed too and took his own life before being captured, his death apparently soon followed by his father’s, though whether from shock or assassination is impossible now to tell.

After a surplus of bloodshed, an incipient civil war, evidently and always only just slightly below the surface, the shattered nation would have pulled Silakala Ambasamanera’s 13-year reign deep into their weary hearts in 526 CE. Having managed the career move from monk to warrior earlier with such success, Silakala proved himself something of a shoo-in for king.

He delegated much to his sons, pushing the two oldest out of the capital and far from its many attendant temptations, with one, Dathappabhuti, sent to administer the south, and the oldest, Moggallana, sent off to manage the east of the country.

Secure in his capital, Silakala Ambasamanera busied himself, irritating his monks – or at least some of them. For this king, unlike the last few, was more inclined towards Mahayana Buddhism, a preference that did not go down well with the majority Theravada Buddhist establishment.

Matters came to a head when a young merchant arrived unexpectedly at court, carrying with him the Lotus Sutra, a document held in the highest esteem by Mahayana Buddhists. Its two main teachings were seen as borderline blasphemous by the Theravadans, for they stated that all Buddhist practices offer ways of reaching Buddhahood, and that the Lord Buddha himself did not pass into final Nirvana but was still alive and actively teaching. The king, said one monk, witheringly, had so little understanding of real doctrine that he was like a "firefly who thinks it is the sun."  Nevertheless, the firefly arranged for the sutra to be housed in Jetavanaramaya itself, with an annual festival held to honour it.

The king’s deft hand at government got weaker as he got older. He found himself facing so great a rebellion in the southern province of Ruhuna that he lost control of the region altogether to a Moriyan nobleman called Mahanaga, a man who would, in another twist between the Lambakanna and Moriyan clans, in time become king himself.

Despite these later cheerless clouds, the king still managed to die a natural death in 531 CE. After a brief skirmish among his sons, Upatissa, Dathappabhuti, and Moggallana, he was succeeded by Dathappabhuti – but not for long. Dathappabhuti had eased his way to the succession by killing his brother Upatissa, but he also fatally neglected to kill his older brother,  Moggallana.

Inevitably, Moggallana assembled an army and headed off to war. The ancient chronicles say that the two brothers decided on the unusual practice of single combat to determine who would win the day. During the ensuing duel, Dathappabhuti’s elephant was wounded, and the six-month king, seeing that his time was up, put himself to the sword. The war of the three brothers was over, and once again the country settled into a period of stability – for Moggallana II was to rule for 20 years, from 531 to 551 CE.

Although the new king soon gave up on the possibility of winning back Ruhuna, he concentrated his efforts on taking good care of what he actually possessed. The consequences of this decision have since led to his gain...

Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure, the town, like the country, has more than its fair share of ghosts. And plenty of gods as well: all of them centre stage; stage left, stage right. Indeed, rarely, if ever, off stage. Not least Buddhism itself, the foremost and complex creed, is little different now from when it first arrived on the island in 236 BCE.

From the ten-headed demon king Ravana of Lanka to the country’s founding father, a terrorising prince descended from lions, the island’s earliest creation myths feature a multitude of alarming divinities. Set beside them, the animist and ancestral spirits of the island’s original inhabitants, the Vedda, feature with almost kindly comfort. 

Kindness might be said to have been in short supply with much of what followed: the demanding Catholic dogmas of the early Portuguese invaders, the innumerable Hindu gods of the Tamils, the strict protestant god of the Dutch, and his Anglican iteration; the rigorous god of Islam, albeit with a more forgiving spirit among the Malay moors.

And all are present in distant Trincomalee. But for a place so abundantly represented on any map, Trincomalee itself remains oddly invisible. 

It is not what it seems, a small town of passing consequence. Like a true aristocrat, it wears its reputation with uttermost modesty, restrained as a crown of sapphires under a hoodie. 

The great eastern port of the ancient kings, a later key link in the chain of European wars fought from 1652 to the downfall of Napoleon that turned South Asia British, it holds its history with absolute discretion, noticeable only if you look amongst its graves and within some of its almost vanished communities; in the scared walls of temples and buildings linked to the passage of its many gods, its forgotten kings and even great artists – all symbolised by the rare birds that flock to an overlooked lagoons north of the town.

Whilst Sri Lankans and tourists alike cluster around the south coast, and a few choice parts of the centre of the island, barely any make it to this part of the east coast.

Once part of the Rajarata, the homeland of the first island kings, Trincomalee and the east slowly became ever more isolated as the island’s development surged along the western seaboard, in the hill country, and in the far south. 

The modern world pushed it even further to a back seat - thirty years of civil war, a tsunami, and the troubled new decades of the twenty first century, years marked so extravagantly by the fact that it was an island off the town that was selected as one of the only remote safe spots to house a prime minster, toppled by the 2022 Aragalaya that saw so much old government swept aside.

Two main roads lead into the town – the A12 from Anuradhapura and the A6 from Dambulla, both skirting a large wildlife park - whilst a third, the A15, leads towards the coastal villages of the south. 

None brings with them that dawning sense of bleak certainty that you are approaching an urban centre. There are no outlying suburbs or factory sites to speak of. Optimistic half-built retail outlets, busted petrol stations, billboards proclaiming glittering but affordable developments of villas and family homes: all are missing. 

A beautiful, sparse, and dry landscape borders the roads, ceding very occasionally to almost green forests. A most twenty-first-century silence grows as you cut through the countryside, arriving, almost without notice, at Trincomalee itself.

And almost immediately, you find yourself driving along an esplanade, the sea on one side and a graveyard of miniature and broken architectural wonders on the other. 

Within it, most unexpectedly lies a monument connected to the world’s greatest novelist: Jane Austen, for the cemetery contains the grave of her favourite brother, Charles Austen - her “own particular little brother,” and the model for the manly and caring character of William Price in Mansfield Park.

Etched indelibly across a wide rectangle of granite read the words 

“Sacred to the memory of His Excellency C.J. Austen, Esq., Champion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath, Rear Admiral of the Red and Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty’s Naval Forces on the East India and China Station, Rear Admiral Charles Austen CB. Died off Prome, while in command of the Naval Expedition on the river Irrawaddy against the Burmese Forces, aged 73 years.”

Outliving his more famous sister by decades, Charles was an euthanistic reader of novels – especially hers; and it is perhaps no little accident that the brother of so great a writer should lie in gentle comfort here on an island whose contemporary writers have so recently burst like firecrackers over world fiction – from Sri Lanka itself of course, but also from Canada, Australia, the UK, the US or New Zealand, part of a raw diaspora created by civil war and corruption.  

Their fiction has become an unexpected global embassy, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, and bankruptcy. And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first. 

Family was close to Charles Austen’s heart far beyond his famous sister, for he created a scandal back home with his serial marriage to two sisters. But this failed to detract from his lasting memory, and he is remembered by one of his subordinates as stoic and dutiful to the end. 

“Our good admiral won the hearts of all by his gentleness and kindness while he was struggling with disease and endeavouring to do his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the British naval forces in these waters. His death was a great grief to the whole fleet. I know that I cried bitterly when I found he was dead.”

All around his grave are earlier and later graves, mostly of British colonists, military officers and engineers who staffed this most distant part of the empire. Out of tombs and obelisks, which enhance the weathered details of Georgian architecture, grow trees and shrubs. Buffalo graze amidst them. “Home at last, thy labours done, “reads the tomb of Charles Frank Miller, who died aged 235 in 1899, “safe and blessed the victory won…angels now have welcomed thee.”

It is rumoured that occasionally a few dedicated members of the Jane Austen society fly out to tend Charles Austen’s grave; but come more often they must, for within the next few decades the graveyard will be all but obliterated by weather and neglect, like the vanished church of St Stephen’s that once oversaw it all. 

In the placid residential suburbs north of the graveyard lives another fast-disappearing record of the island’s colonial times – this one linked to the Portuguese, who first came to the island in 1505. For here, around the self-contained streets of Palayittu live the last descendants of the island’s Burgher community – descendants of Portuguese and sometimes Dutch men and local women who still speak a remarkabl...

 Writing a few centuries later, the historian Al-Tabari notes of the moment: “the king sent one of his commanders with a numerous army against Serendib, the land of precious stones, in the land of India. The commander attacked the king, killed him, and seized control of it, sending back from here to Kisa abundant wealth and many jewels.”  Clearly, the Persians wasted no time in ransacking the sensational riches of Sigiriya. Later Persian commentators record that the flow of bounty never really ceased. It continued for years to come and, in addition to items such as horses, jewels, and natural resources, elephants, teak, and pearl divers. It was less the gifts of one grateful king to another, and more tribute paid by a vassal to his master.
 
Unlike Kashyapa, who referred to himself as Maharaja or Great King, the inscriptions so far discovered for his brother Moggallana, and even Moggallana’s heir, merely refer to them as Rajas. Raja is most certainly a title used by lesser kings – kings beholden to other kings, not least Persian kings of kings. Studies of ancient texts by Professor Paranavitana suggest that the Anuradhapuran monks welcomed him as an imperial representative of the Persian king, not as a Sri Lankan king in his own right. Little good it did them, for the new king sided with the new money and the newer version of religion in the old city and did nothing to stop his merchants from unleashing so unremittingly barbaric a bout of bloodshed against often quite blameless people that the new king gained another title: “Rakshasa” – monster.
 
Persian imports flooded into the country – there is even evidence of Persian wine jars found in small villages near Dambulla, not known then, or now, for its predilection for fine wines. Excavations dating back to these times have revealed an abundance of Persian coinage and a Persian Nestorian cross, whilst testifying to the presence of scores of Persian ships docking in Sri Lankan ports. But of Roman artefacts found in plenty before this time, archaeologists today have unearthed nothing dating to this transformative period before the country pivoted towards Persia.
 
Moggallana is also known to have invested in a new navy to patrol the sea coasts, possibly tasked with deterring Roman ships, including those sent by Roman allies. Sri Lankan embassies sent to the Chinese emperor, representative at the time of Dhatusena and Kasyapa, abruptly ended and recommenced only in the 7th century as the Moriyan dynasty neared its end, a time that coincided with the collapse of the Persian empire itself when the king of kings fell to the Arab Caliphate in 654 CE.
 
Little is known of how Moggallana's reign went following the coup that brought him to power. He is presented in history books on the island today as a strong, capable, and respected king who busied himself with monastery and temple improvements – and not as a Persian vassal. His monster status is also conveniently overlooked.  The reality must have been much more complicated and nuanced. Keeping the Persian paymasters happy would have been a most consuming task – ensuring they reaped the commercial rewards that brought them to him in the first place, and keeping them in check as best he could, despite their random attacks on his subjects. No less all-consuming would have been simply maintaining the balance of power in Anuradhapura among competing versions of Buddhism, insurgent Christians, Theravada Buddhists, and merchants merely out to make lots of money.
 
Moggallana would certainly have welcomed a wonderful piece of serendipity when the Kesha Dhatu, the Hair Relic of Lord Buddha, found its way into his kingdom, brought there by a monk he had befriended whilst in exile in India – Silakala Ambasamanera, a Lambakarna ally. The relic was given the grandest of all receptions, carried in a great procession and enshrined in a crystal box placed in a specially built temple. Silakala was said to have been appointed its guardian, a task he took so seriously that he forsook his monkish status and became the king's sword-bearer (Asiggahasilakala) instead. This change of career would haunt the Moriyan kings, for Silakala Ambasamanera proved so adept at warfare that he would later seize the throne for himself.
 
Moggallana was succeeded in 515 by his son Kumara Dhatusena. It was a shockingly aimable succession. The new king described himself in the only inscriptio...

The move was no mere residential relocation.  It was not just a new palace that Kashyapa built, but a new seat of government. In this, he acted far more like Akhenaten, the heretical Egyptian pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, who moved his capital from Thebes to the purpose-built city of Akhenaten – or Amarna. The pharaoh was to die with suspicious normality, and his son, Tutankhamun, wasted little time in swiftly moving the capital back to Thebes, a pattern that was to haunt both Kashyapa and his sibling successor, Moggallana.

Hints of the long-lost forces that impelled and inspired such actions are now almost entirely lost. Although Kashyapa gained his crown by the simple expedient of murdering his father, Dhatusena, it is more than likely that he was largely put up to it by his brother-in-law, the General Migara. Migara had been instrumental in placing Dhatusena on the throne decades earlier but had fallen out badly with his father-in-law when the king murdered the general’s wife, who, as was the way with things then, was also the king’s sister. Sri Lankan politics, then, as now, is rarely straightforward, but this moment of homespun realpolitik set such new standards for utter complexity that they are still to be bettered today. 

Undoubtedly, these family squabbles would have fed off all that was going on in the kingdom at the time. And there was a lot else going on. Under Dhatusena, Anduraupura had been turned on its head, the once inward-looking city now humming with foreigners, most of whom had come to either trade or convert. Arabs, Jews, Europeans, and Indians are just some of the groups known to have taken exuberant root in the city, as it opened itself up once more to the bountiful trade and money brought to Sri Lanka by the Maritime Silk Road – that vast maritime network of the ancient world that linked East Africa, Arabia, India, and China to Europe.  The kingdom was enjoying a moment of money-spinning madness, with riches pouring into the land as never before, transforming life much as the railroads did in 19th-century America. With trade came new forms of religion – Christianity, for example, and – much more threateningly – alternative schools of Buddhism that Sri Lanka’s overwhelmingly and all-powerful Theravada Buddhists saw as blatantly heretical. Conversions this way or that, as well as making and spending money, were the new order of play. 

General Migara is thought to have leveraged these nascent forces to empower himself, but his alliance with Kashyapa came under pressure. The new king did not see himself as the leader of a Liberation revolution, however much he tolerated it for its money-making powers. 

Kashyapa’s preference was for crafting a much more traditional and politically useful personal reputation – as a Buddhist God-king. An intriguing hint of this artful propaganda was discovered in a contemporary rock inscription in the monastery of Thimbiriwewa. The inscription noted a donation given “in the tenth year of the raising of the umbrella of dominion by the Great King Kashyapa, the Lord of Alaka.”  Alaka is a reference to the God Kuvera, the legendary ruler of mythical Lanka. Traditional Buddhists were familiar with this blending of god with king, a fusion that did much to legitimise government. If kings were gods, or as good as, what right did any subject, might or meagre, have to obstruct them? It was not in Kashyapa’s interests to do anything to imperil the traditional way in which his people regard kingship. Indeed, he is known to come very actively to the assistance of Theravada Buddhists when General Migara sought to emasculate them by favouring rival Buddhist schools whose attitudes to kingship were perhaps a little looser.

But Kashyapa’s predilection for the expediencies of traditional religion was not always returned by grateful monks, many of whom, thinking it unsuitable for a king to have killed his own father, viewed him as well beyond the pale. One monastery is even known to have refused his offer of donations, branding him a father-killer. With his old capital,  Anduraupura, a seething pit of viperous power politics, and religion itself too often an uncertain alley, what better plan than to start anew at Sigiriya. Of money, there was no shortage, so building a better future elsewhere was well within his powers. But did he? 

Kashyapa's reign lasted little more than 20 years, and it is a mathematical impossibility that in so short a time, so celebrated a place as Sigiriya could ever have been started, let alone finished. Indeed, it is unlikely that the previous king, Dhatusena, even established the city fortress. Modern historians are instead converging on the view that the site was begun much earlier, in 341 CE, by the Lambakanna king, Buddhadasa, a ruler so beloved that the Mahavamsa Chronicle has him down as a "Mind of Virtue and an Ocean of Gems".

Archaeologists have discovered building periods in and around the site that point to earlier dates, though they have also noted how, over the Kashyapa years, the plans become monumentally more ambitious. Until more research is done, hunches, probabilities, and guesswork are the ephemeral friends of choice for concluding that Kashyapa, in moving to Sigiriya, relocated to an existing site and then set about radically improving it, not unlike Louis XIV at Versailles.

But such caveats aside, Kashyapa’s Sigiriya was nevertheless one of the greatest wonders of Ancient Asia. It set imposing new standards for urban planning, the royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens around it: water, terraced, and boulder gardens - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel. Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. More naturalistic gardens were created around massive boulders, mimicking an artless park with long, winding pathways to saunter down. Brick staircases and limestone steps led up to more formal terraced gardens.

Across it all stretched double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps in perfect geometric symmetry, locking all the elements of the fortress city together with mathematical precision and elegance and pierced by the massive sentinel sculpture of a crouching lion. The beast guards the staircase to the ancient palace six hundred feet above, though all that remains now are the two animal paws, rediscovered in excavations in 1898. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. 

The whole site was fuelled by a remarkable hydraulic irrigation system - the child of the most advanced water technology in the then-known world Rock-cut horizontal and vertical drains, underground terracotta pipes, tanks, ponds, interconnected conduits, cisterns, moats, and waterways channelled surface water to stop erosion and tapped other water sources to deliver water to the huge ornamental gardens, the city and palace - and harness it to help cool the microclimate of the royal residences.

The consequences of the state’s remarkable achievements in water technology had given rise to similar attainments in many, many other quarters – all of which came to bear down w...

And then there is real news. 

Recently, I have taken to walking the dogs up Singing Civet Hill, down the Coconut Gove, through the jungle path and out onto the newly planted Chocolate Walk that links back to the Spice Garden and the estate entrance.

As subjects go, dog walking routes are way up there - with global warming, or the Oscars, choices of totemic influence, able to steer the whole day this way or that. And where the day goes, the week, the year, the millennia  follows.

Bertie is still gated so cries in the office or has a private garden-only walk with Ranjan. I take the other four into great, occasionally tamed, wilderness. There are wild boar prints to smell, the track of a mouse deer, porcupine a plenty, wild dogs, and of course, monkeys. For Archie, Bianca, Coco and Nestor, the stroll is akin to entering naked into a cream cake shop and letting rip. 

A golden sun filters through jungle trees. Dry leaves shift underfoot. A vast blue sky implies itself from above. Apart from the excited sniffs and scratches of the dogs in their virtual cream cake shop, it is silent. Meditation silent. Soul silent. The sort of silence impossible to image within a yard of asphalt.

Even so, there are traces of human activities. In this case, young Mr Goonetilleke’s attempt to keep wild animals off his plants. 

Thin strips of steel wire had been stretched on boundaries and anchored to electrical forces so strong as to give me a nasty jolt when I walked in to one. It certainly deterred me. But not the animals, who hopped across, or simply waited for a coconut leaf to fall on the wire and short it.

Occasionally Mr Goonetilleke attempted to revise his technical masterpiece, but in the end, he refocused his ubiquitous expertise into solving other problems, leaving him, and us, a little wiser than before about the uses of electricity. 

Experts, like love bombs, are everywhere on this island. It is one of its principal human features; one of Sri Lanka’s many little bits of lovely.  Not for these shores, the remote and gifted expert, given to Deus ex Machina pronouncements, rare as Burmese rubies, on what should be done in this instance, or that case.

No. In Sri Lanka, the expert is there right next to you, just like Mr Goonetilleke, ready to intervene. On the train, in the street, at the doctor’s waiting room, his expertise in whatever the matter in hand, worn since birth, and so much a part of his physiology that you might as well try to sever an arm or ear, as to sever this part too.

The journey to this remarkable state of national know-how has been long and meandering, journeying past centuries of want, and decades of central bureaucratic incompetence, enlivened with parrots like flashes of glittering arrogance. From banking, electricity, and tea, to fish, drugs, cement, and chickens, state owned industries remain wedded to The Frank Sinatra Dictum:– “I've lived a life that's full / I've travelled each and every highway / And more, much more / I did it, I did it my way.”  

Whisper if you will that they are largely technically insolvent or as dated as dinosaur in a poodle parlour – it is to no avail. Their expert song sounds on. And on. The elites rule. Their way, or no way.

Sometimes – not often – it all breaks down. The Civil War, JVP Uprisings, Hartal, Aragalaya. People get fed up with experts. And all hell breaks loose. 

But Sri Lankan society is nothing if not civil, and in between these moments of madness a kind of gorgeous mannered existence runs along paddy tracks from village to village. The Emperor has no clothes? Of course he hasn’t. He’s so naked you can count the mosquito bites on his buttocks. But such a lovely hat. And the scarf he is imaging he is wearing. That too is beautiful, offsetting the make-believe sarong, just so.

As the experts busy themselves choosing their special clothes for the day and getting ready to advise those few people they have time to see, the rest of society just get on with it. Everyone is an expert in almost everything. They have to be, or life would simply stop in its tracks like a perfumer with a pegged nose. Expertise is not something you can outsource. To make the right choice you have to know so much as to leave you cleaving to the wings of a rocket as it does it 360 orbit of any problem or issue.

“Generator blown,” observed Kasum, the chef. “I’ll fix it.”  I begged him not to. But he did it anyway. And it sort of worked.

Its mildly terrifying, marginally irritating and wholly discombobulating when suddenly you need to be the expert. And nowhere is this more true than in matters of health.

Soft westerner as I am, I’m accustomed to seeing a general practitioner for anything from a head bump to a throat sniffle. With celestial expertise, the GP will point me the right way –  this specialist or that; this test or that; this hospital or that. But not here. Not in the jungle country of Galagedera. Or even on the temple lined roads of Kandy. Nor even on the boulevards of Colombo.

No. If you’re sick, you must work out why. 

Nose problem? ENT perhaps? Unless is it from a fever. Or an intolerance of sapu pollen. Stiff leg? Muscle probably. Or it is bone? Or perhaps it’s the blood. God knows. But you too also need to know – and with sufficient certainty to enter confidently into the fun fair that is the health system (s).

Across the island four health sectors entertain their customers like octopi at an orgy. There is the traditional state medicine sector, all hospitals, qualifications, doctors, nurses, ministries, pill, and potion factories. And the private traditional medical sector, dominated by who so ever occupies the space.

Set against both is the western medical state sector – no less populated by its own hospitals, practices, qualifications, experts, and medicines. Facing this is the private sector -  a handful of plush hospitals, expert doctors, reception desks with beautiful flowers dying in large vases, waiting rooms of Nordic furniture rearranged ever so slightly cocktail style.

For anyone to get anywhere in the western medical sector you need to play in both sectors. Despite the brain drain, COVID and the Aragalaya, the island has a notable universal free health care system but there are long waiting lists for specialized procedures. Private care is a necessity most people try to budget for.

Unlike my hounds, my own ability to sniff, smell and interact with full olfactory fervour, had over the months, diminished to a barely useable half a nostril.

Like Simon of Cyrene I carried my little adenoidal cross until oxygen deprivation set in. Anything to avoid the experts. But eventually, the unflusterable Machan drove me to Asiri Hospital, a place of such reassuring modernity as to make you welcome illness.  

Yet I make it sound simple. To get even this far I had first had to enter into the rum liturgy of DOC990, an online doctor booking service. To book the right doctor you must first self-diagnose, just like an expert. ENT? Why not. But of the scores of ENT doctors – the same names appearing on multiple hospital site appointment boards -  which was the best? Google is coy on the matter. So, I picked the one with the most scholarly articles to his name. 

The learned doctor was late. One hour passed. Two hours trembled on the edge. This is the thing about experts. To be late is to expert. To be very late is to be a doyen of professional authority. For each 30 minutes of his appointment diary, he had prebooked in 4 patients. And there we sat, pathetically forbearing, eager for news of the great man.

But of news, there was none. 

Even the grea...

Inevitably, many in his army were terribly injured, and under the naval doctor, Dimas Bosque, a beach hospital was erected.  Bosque, described as  "a very cultured man, well known for his veracity, and quite sagacious in the treatment of illnesses,” took up the story in a letter later discovered in the Jesuit library in France.  

“One day, a crowd of fishermen came to the Father, requesting him, with loud shouting in their own language, to go to their boats and look at some fish they had caught. They said that while they were fishing, they had, by a stupendous miracle of nature, either by luck or that the marvellous works of God the Almighty might be spoken of, caught in their nets nine female fishes and seven males, which, because they resembled human beings, the natives themselves called "sea men" and "sea women". "Struck by the novelty, as was natural, we went to the boats. The fishermen who had remained there had already taken the fish out of the boats and laid them on the shore. When I saw them and contemplated how greatly they resembled human beings, I could scarcely breathe. In wonderment, I could hardly turn my eyes away from their admirable bodies. What I saw then with my own eyes I would never have believed if someone else had told me. I kept staring at these fish with their marvellous resemblance to human beings. Such a work of nature seemed hardly believable even while I was looking at it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, helped by Christian philosophy, I referred the extraordinary shape of the fish before me to God, the maker of all things, to whom nothing is difficult to make, let alone impossible. I considered it worthwhile to inspect each particular member, so that, after examining the anatomy of each part, I would clearly understand the similitude of the whole body with that of a human being. Externally, the resemblance was very great.”

What Bosque had actually discovered was not mermaids but dugongs.  He was by no means the first to confuse the two. Christopher Columbus himself had come across them a few years earlier, noting in his diary - “the day before, when the Admiral was going to the Rio del Oro, he said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in the face they look like men.”

Hundreds of years of brutal hunting have since driven this most marvellous of all the island’s sea mammals to the brink of extinction.  But a gentler creature would be hard to find.

Growing to around eleven feet in length, with poor eyesight but a good sense of smell, they propel themselves forward by flippers and tail, and although they can live up to seventy years, longevity is now but a dugong dream.  Widespread legal protection has not stopped them from being hunted, whilst habitat pollution and degradation have also decimated their numbers. In Sri Lanka, their meat was highly sought and considered to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties; diaries note that, as recently as the 1950s, over 150 slaughtered animals were offered for sale annually in Mannar alone. Their cautious reproductive habits do not much help them either, with males taking sometimes as many as eighteen years to reach sexual maturity. The impressive Dugong and Seagrass Conservation Project reports depressingly that “large herds of dugongs were reported to have occurred in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka in the early 1900s; however, none were sighted during aerial surveys conducted of Palk Bay and the waters off western Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and their current status and distribution are unknown.” Even so, there have been uncorroborated reports of more recent sightings, including one in 2017 in Puttalam Lagoon, where some say they still live, grazing on seagrass meadows in shallow bays and mangroves.

But out beyond these sheltered shores, in deeper waters, Sri Lanka’s other sea mammals are faring better, and the country is one of the best places in Asia to sort them – especially in Mirissa, from November to April; off Trincomalee, from May to September; or Kalpitiya, from December to March.

Three capacious seas splash against Sri Lanka’s beaches – from the east, the Bay of Bengal; from the west, the Laccadive Sea; and from the south, the Indian Ocean. Purists clamour for a fourth – the shallow Palk Straits that link the north of the island to the south of India. Either way, the country is blessed to be so centrally located to a great mix of oceans. Like a roundabout amidst a myriad of roads, its shores are a nursery, school, home, and larder for a plenitude of marine creatures, not least its mammals. Whale watching, with abundant side helpings of dolphin and the odd bit of porpoise watching, is propelling a whole new branch of environmental tourism.

Scientists estimate that across the 90 species of whales found today, there are about 1.5 million creatures, many of which are centred around specific oceans. Sri Lanka boasts 12 of these massive saltwater residents, including the most magnificent of whales – the Blue Whale, one of the country’s two most commonly encountered sea beasts. 

Measuring up to one hundred feet, there is nothing that still lives on our harried planet quite so large or inspiring as the Blue Whale. From Moby-Dick and the prophet Jonah to Aristotle and Kipling, they have become creatures whose literary heritage is almost as impressive as their mythological one. They sing, live blamelessly on krill, and press on through the ups and downs of life for up to ninety years. The males sport a 3 metre penis, the largest of any species still alive. They are truly one of our planet’s greatest wonders, yet have been hunted to the brink of extinction, their numbers falling from around 140,000 in 1926 to some 25,000 in 2018. Today, they also face grave threats from ship collisions and rising noise pollution. They take about 10 years to reach sexual maturity and produce calves every 2 to 3 years – a low, slow reproductive process that further strains their global numbers. The only area of the world they seem to avoid is the Arctic. Remarkably, the blue whales found off Sri Lanka’s beaches are permanent residents, their otherwise migratory inclinations negated by the sheer magnetic nutrient wealth of the country’s waters, fed by run off and monsoon rain and captured by an ocean shelf that is perfectly constituted to maximise the availability and accessibility of food.

The Sperm whale, Or Cachalot Whale, is the other whale often seen here.  Massive, migratory, equipped with the largest brain of any living creature, and able to live up to seventy years, the Sperm Whale is everything that a well-bred species of whale aims to be. It abounds in superlatives: a four-chambered stomach, the longest intestinal system of any creature in the world; capable of emitting a sound louder than any other living beast, and happiest swimming in ice-free waters over 1,000 metres deep. Hunted by commercial whalers for hundreds of years, their numbers were pushed to the point of extreme vulnerability, but have since started to recover – slowly. They are one of the most sighted whales off Sri Lanka’s shores, tempted by warm and plentiful seas to group together and mate, forming super pods of sometimes a hundred b...

He is a generous, positive fellow, little given to jewellery – except for this fingers.  These more than make up for any deficit.  They carry a rich selection of rings, the most impressive the size of a small calculator, its flat square surface a golden field on which are displayed, in neat rows, nine precious and semi-precious stones.

As he waved his arms about, explaining what pipe would go where and how our deep well water provision would now be enriched by his fixed line water, the sun glinted on his fingers, and the trickle of gloom that I had started to feel at my total lack of commitment to personal jewellery, become a flood.

Some people are born with voices that will carry them deep into the world of opera, or a figure on which rags or rich silk outfits can be placed with equal grace.  Others are born with no instinct for jewels.  

I have just sufficient levels of self-awareness to know that toe or finger rings, and necklaces do little for my truculent beauty.  But I also know, albeit from school, that tiaras can improve me.   

Whether it was a tiara or a small gold crown much garnished with glass rubies, I cannot now remember.  But it did the trick.  

My blonde hair appeared more golden, my complexion a more prosperous pink, my head longer - as if the brain beneath my temples had given an atypical opportunity to just smile, and be blessed, and take time off from thinking.   Sadly the tiara disappeared once the play we were performing came to an end.  

I sensed later that earrings would have also done well on  me; sapphire or gold nuggets, giving my overlooked lobes something special to hug.   
This emotional deficit does not stop me appreciating jewellery on others, through here in the jungle, Mr Wijeratne excepted, it is a rare sight.  But when it does appear, it makes the sort of glorious waves that Moses must have done as he trekked down from the mountain waving his tablets.  

Not long ago five ladies from St Petersburg came to stay.  They dressed in a rich selection of gemstones for dinner, including two hair ornaments that may or may not have been tiaras; or State Crowns.  Often pearls, rings, and earrings catch the gentle candlelight over dinner, but rarely do they offer the sort of overwhelming light force that you might encounter at a coronation, in Hi! Magazine,  the Tatler Diary, or on meeting Luke Skywalker’s  Cloud City lightsaber

Which is a shame, especially here, for Sri Lanka is practically the home of gemstones. If biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems, are to be believed, the country’s gem mines can be back dated to 900 BCE. "The king of Ceylon,” wrote Marco Polo in the 13th century, has “the grandest ruby that was ever seen, a span in length, the thickness of a man's arm; brilliant beyond description, and without a single flaw. Its worth cannot be estimated in money”.  

Thanks to the extreme old age of its rocks, Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous as to just wash out onto flood plains, and into rivers and streams. Twenty five percent of its land is gem-bearing, especially around Ratnapura and Elahera.  From here come the 75 semi or precious gems that call this island home:  rubies, sapphires, spinels, amethysts, sapphires, garnets, rose quartz, aquamarines, tourmalines, agates, cymophanes, topazes, citrines, alexandrites, zircons, and moonstones.  

And it was from Ratnapura over the past several years that sapphires the size of supermarket baskets have been found. So great is the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires that the nation might legitimately put in for a name change to be better called Sri Sapphire. They account for 85% of the precious stones mined here – but the colour variant that gets the most acclaim is the Ceylon Blue Sapphire, the blue of cornflowers, clear skies, and inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, they are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”.  

And so they do.  Since Ptolemy noted their glittering existence here, they are much favoured for crowns, thrones, diadems, as well as jewellery for First Nights, hotel dinners and cocktail parties. Sri Lanka’s sapphires have given museums and auction houses jewels of such arresting quality as to gain themselves names and identities in the own right 

Diana, Princess of Wales’s engagement ring, a mere 12-carats of Sri Lankan sapphire, rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for her in 1981.  But the lead Windsor in House of Windsor can easily eclipse this.  The Suart Sapphire, said to be Sri Lankan, sits atop the very crown still worn by the British monarch, and is probably the world’s most visible sapphire. 

Excepting, that is The Heart of the Ocean, In a perfect example of nature obediently following Hollywood, the so-called Heart of the Ocean jewel in the film “Titanic,” was posthumously created following the film’s success as a 170-carat Ceylon blue sapphire.  The sapphire replaced the inexpensive blue quartz flung by Kate Winslet into the icy ocean.  It was worn in 1998 by Celine Dion when she sang  “My Heart Will Go On” at the Oscars and was auctioned for over $2 million at a charity ball though more affordable copies of the necklace can be bought on eBay.

For art lovers there is the Fitzwilliam’s Aphrodite Sapphire. For the religious minded, the 9th century Talisman of Charlemagne.  Both Sri Lankan.  Many have found their way into other museums, to be gazed at but never again worn, like the 423-carat Logan Sapphire, the 287-carat Star of Artaban, The Bismark Sapphire (the ultimate honeymoon gift), or the 182-carat Star of Bombay, worn by “America’s sweetheart,” Mary Pickford.  All four now live in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.  Two other world -class island sapphires shine brightly in the American Museum of Natural History - the 563.35-carat almost flawless Star of India, and the 116.75-carat Midnight Star Sapphire.

Russians, slipping through the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate to the State Diamond Collection, can feast on the Empress Maria's Sapphire. Despite its massive size (260.37 carats), it is surrounded by such an orgy of other rare gems, insignia, and crown jewels that it is practically invisible.

But many of the best have simply vanished – on the auction block one moment, then lost to public delight the next.  The Blue Belle Of Asia, sold in 2014 for $17.29 million is one never again sighted.  So too the 600-carat Blue Giant Of The Orient, last spotted in Geneva in 2004.

The first of the really colossal sapphires only appeared as recently as 1998 when the 856-carat Pride of Sri Lanka was pulled from mines of Marapanna, a few kilometres from Rathnapura. In a year overshadowed by the violent excesses of the civil war, its discovery, along with the country’s cricket team’s victory in the test match against England, was one of the country’s few bright moments.

Barely a decade later, in 2015, came The Star of Adam.  At 1,444-carats, it rather brutally eclipsed the Pride of Sri Lanka.  And if this was not sufficient, it also displayed a distinct 6-rayed star, an effect known amongst jewellers as “asterism.” This produces an internal reflection effect, similar to ha...

Its moment of destruction coincides most neatly with the date most historians give for the end of the ancient world itself – 500 CE. Just 5 years beforehand, the ancient world itself had come crashing to a bloody end around the base of this 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 that has been 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 the skill of a card shark. He outmanoeuvred his brother and, with the army commander's help, 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 Anuradhapura in much the same way as Tiberius had abandoned Rome for Capri, and headed for Sigiriya. 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 fortress itself sits atop a massive lump of granite - a hardened, much reduced magma plug – all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermit monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by Kashyapa as the location of a new fortress-capital in 477 CE.

Much of it is hard to identify today but, in its day, it set new standards for urban planning, the royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens around it:  water, terraced, and boulder gardens - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel.

Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. More naturalistic gardens were created around massive boulders, creating an artless park with long, winding pathways to saunter down. Brick staircases and limestone steps led up to more formal terraced gardens. 

Across it all stretch double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps in perfect geometric symmetry, locking all the elements of the fortress city together with mathematical precision and elegance and pierced by the massive sentinel sculpture of a crouching lion. The beast guards the staircase to the ancient palace six hundred feet above, though all that remains now are the two animal paws, rediscovered in excavations in 1898. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place: “Sigiriya,” the Singhalese for “Lion’s Rock.” It is as if the walls of heaven itself defend it.

When Kashyapa died, having wisely chosen to drive a sword through his own body rather than be captured alive, the city sank into a desolate retreat for a handful of monks getting so overgrown by jungle through the passing centuries that its rediscovery in 1831 by Major Jonathan Forbes of the 78th (Highlanders) Regiment of Foot was the sensation of the year. Forbes was no ordinary officer. His book, Eleven Years in Ceylon, published in 1840, is regarded as a masterpiece. He himself was so obsessed with rumours of Sigiriya that he dedicated himself to detection, writing later: “From the spot where we halted, I could distinguish massive stone walls appearing through the trees near the base of the rock, and now felt convinced that this was the very place I was anxious to discover.”

Decades after the publication of Forbes’ book, the complete glory that underpinned Sigiriya was gradually revealed.  Central to it all was its reliance on the world's most advanced water technology to power its fountains, lakes, wells, streams, and waterfalls.  Rock-cut horizontal and vertical drains, underground terracotta pipes, tanks, ponds, interconnected conduits, cisterns, moats, and waterways channelled surface water to stop erosion. They tapped other water sources to deliver water to the huge ornamental gardens, the city and palace - and harness it to help cool the microclimate of the royal residences.

Exhibited here in Sigiriya are the most significant advances the country has made in developing technology and practices to harness the water that powers the state itself.  Climbing to the top will not reveal them; indeed, most of it is still lost underground or in the forest.  But it is there – traces of it, evident to the trained eye.

“There will,” stated Stephen King deferentially, “be water if God wills it.”  But as any ancient Sri Lankan would have told him, this is only half the truth of the matter. Water, uncollected, undistributed, unpurified, is all but useless, however much ...

With over a third of the country still covered by forests and over 800 trees and shrubs to choose from, the island is a tree hugger’s Shangri-la, and on first sight, it would seem quite logical to assume that Sri Lanka was overrun with monkeys of many species. But in fact, the reverse is true. Quality trumps quantity. Just three variants are found on the island: The Hanuman Langur, the Purple-Faced Langur, and the Toque Macaque.

The Hanuman Langur

The Hanuman langur, also called the Tufted Grey langur, is one of three Semnopithecus priam variants, all of which are found in India. Still, only Semnopithecus priam thersites lives in Sri Lanka.

Various theories – conflicting, convoluted and essentially unprovable – have been put forward to account for why the Sri Lankan subspecies, thersites, differs from those found in India. However, the differences would tax Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's deductive powers. Even so, patriotic toxicologists are pressing the case for the Sri Lankan variant to be declared a separate endemic species in its own right.

As the debate on this rumbles on, the langur in question gets on with its life blamelessly – and relatively unthreatened by the millstones of modern life. It was named rather eccentrically after Thersites, a bow-legged antihero from Homer’s Trojan Wars, who Plato later promoted as the man best suited for the afterlife. This was a doubtful honour to bestow on one of Sri Lanka’s elite mammals. 

Up to 60 inches long head to tail, with a weight that can hit close to 15 kilos, its black face is framed by a wispy white beard that runs from forehead to chin. It is a light grey in colour and lives as readily in dry forests as in urban areas – showing a strong preference for ancient cultural sites, as evidenced by its dwellings in places such as Polonnaruwa, Dambulla, Anuradhapura, and Sigiriya. Once settled, they tend to stay put, having little of the gypsy tendency within them. Eagerly vegetarian, they live in troops of up to 50 members, the larger ones being curiously non-sexist, with leadership shared by a male-female pair.

Langur monkeys come with all the complexities of a relatively capacious family – and they live in groups within which strict social hierarchies are observed. Quite how many species belong to the Langur family is a modestly debated subject amongst mammalian taxonomists, but at the last count there were eight. Or seven, depending, stretching from the Himalayas to Sri Lanka.

The Purple-Faced Langur

The Hanuman langur shares the closest of all possible evolutionary relationships with the island’s second monkey species, the purple-faced langur, so much so, in fact, that they have even been known to mate. This is the rarer of the island’s two langur species, its endemic status free of any debate or argument.

It lives mainly in dense forests but is now threatened by habitat loss, which has noticeably reduced its numbers. Vegetarian, with a tendency to eat leaves rather than other foods, it is shy and slightly smaller than the Hanuman langur. Still, it can be told apart by its darker colouring, the black-brown fur of its body contrasting with the mop of wispy white fur that surrounds its face and sits atop its head.

Despite, or perhaps because of being one step away from being critically endangered, the purple-faced langur has settled into its different island environments like a hand in a glove and evolved into a variety of subspecies.

The Southern lowland wet zone purple-faced langur stands out for its more varied markings – a black upper torso and lavish white whiskers. Occasionally, all-white versions are spotted.

The Western purple-faced langur - also confusingly named the north lowland wet zone purple-faced langur is the smallest of the lot, its fur a dark greyish brown.

The Dryzone purple-faced langur, in contrast, is the largest version - with arresting white cheeks and an exceptionally long tail.

The Montane purple-faced langur, sometimes called the  Bear Monkey, comes with extra shaggy fur, all the better to keep it warm on the higher mountains on which it prefers to live.

Excited taxologists from Jaffna have also called for the recognition of a fifth subspecies - vetulus harti. Although there are no reliable recorded sightings of it as a living mammal, its pelts have been found around Jaffna and Vavuniya – strikingly yellow gold.

The Toque Macaque 

The island’s third monkey species – the Toque Macaque is to be found almost everywhere, living its best life, undeterred by much of what growing urbanisation can throw at it. Their appearance is one of the most remarkable things about them. With white undersides, golden brown fur on their backs and a car crash of an almost orange coiffure, they look as if they have got lost in a cheap tanning salon or a Trump rally. Pink faces peer out below recherché hairstyles, giving substance to their name - “toque,” the brimless cap that is their bob.

They can weigh up to 12 pounds and have a head-to-tail length of almost a metre. Whilst they have been known to live for thirty-five years, most die within five, victims of infant mortality or fights within troops for dominance. 

They are accomplished scavengers; their vegetarian fancies are best satisfied on fruit. Their capacious cheek pouches are specially adapted to store food for later consumption, a technical refinement that helps them steal, store, and run with their pilfered bounty. 

As dexterous at leaping through trees as at capering across the ground, or even swimming, they move in self-protective groups and sleep huddled together every night in a different place, like chastened celebrities or terrorists. 

They are easy to spot because they are active during daylight hours, appearing in groups of 20, led by an alpha male, with half the group composed of infants or juveniles. Young adult males wisely leave the group upon attaining maturity, for fear of being chased out. But they also have a reputation for being very matey with other species – the family dog, for example. And they talk to one another. Naturalists have recorded over thirty different sounds, each conveying a particular meaning.

Common though they are, they have not prevented them from evolving into three separate endemic variants, their differences indistinct to all but mothers and fond scientists best able to decipher the marginal differences presented in the patterns and colours on their heads.

The Pale-Fronted or Dusky Toque Macaque sticks to the wet zones in the southwest. The Common Toque Macaque favours the dry-zone areas of the north and east. The Highland Toque Macaque favours the hilly centre of the island.

The Loris

Whilst only the most luckless ...

The net result is that this most tiny of all mammals has had - and continues to endure - more name changes than even the hapless city of Plovdiv in Bulgaria. This blameless city of some 350,000 souls, famous for its icon painting, has endured 11 name changes so far. Somewhat coincidentally, it is also renowned for its bats, which host over 20 species and regularly host Bat Nights to introduce its avian mammals to its two-legged ones.

Short of dusting the animals with poisonous radioactive dust and equipping them with a miniature Kalashnikov, there is little else science can really do to make them more unapproachable, which is a terrible shame because bats – like lichen, coral, or bees - are among the world’s best indicator species, those that tell you relatively how healthy or not the environment really is. 

Chiropterologists aside, we ought to pay attention to what is going on in the bat world, for if what bats have to say is anything to go by, then we are in trouble. All around the world, bats are in decline. Facing a tsunami of pollution, habitat loss, climate change, and aggressive new farming techniques, bat numbers worldwide have plummeted, and the continued existence of almost one-third of their species is threatened. It is ironic that, in the face of such a burgeoning catastrophe, the number of identifiable bat species continues to grow – it is now over 1500.

The counting of bat species in Sri Lanka is an art still much in the making, but all the signs are that, notwithstanding the overall decline in numbers, the country bats way above its weight. Though occupying barely 1% of the world's total landmass, Sri Lanka hosts well over 2% of the world's recognised bat species. 

Scientists are, of course, minded to disagree with one another most of the time; indeed, put just one Chiropterologist in a room by himself and you will foster dissent. This is especially true when it comes to nailing down the number of bat species that exist here. It was thought to be 28. Then 29. Several new bats were discovered. Older bats were reclassified. Today, the number appears to be 37, though like adolescents with mood swings, this can change in an instant and often does.

But whatever family, genus, species, or subspecies they belong to, they all share certain bat-like traits. They all fly, for example. Bats are, of course, the only mammals able to truly fly, angels excepted and are famous for roosting upside down from their feet, viewing the world like happy drunks, a propensity made worse by their inferior vision. They all enjoy ultrasonic sound, and with this gift of supercharged hearing, they navigate the world with expert dexterity. Most live in large colonies and are much given to hibernation, a habit that accounts for their exceptionally long lifespan; one bat was recorded as living 41 years. Less happily, many are enthusiastic carriers of disease, especially those best able to leap from animals to humans. 

XS

The Extra Small Bats

Sri Lanka’s bats can best be divided into eight broad categories, the first of which are the tiny bats, the ones so extraordinarily petite that their bodies barely measure 2 to 3 centimetres. There are three bats in the XS range, the smallest being the Indian Pygmy Pipistrelle Bat, whose Latin name (mimus mimus) is all the guidance you really need to know relatively how tiny it is. Next up in size is the Painted Bat, sometimes known as the butterfly bat. Small though it is, the creature is also dazzlingly beautiful, with thick, bright orange fur all over, its wings decorated with black pyramids inset on orange lines, like stained-glass windows. Decidedly less glamorous is the rust brown Pungent Pipistrelle, common in SE Asia but rarely found in Sri Lanka. The more exacting scientists have long ago declared its few sightings here to have been avoidable mistakes. The third XS bat, Hardwicke's Forest Bat, is one of those wretched beasts whose existence has been especially tortured by name changes and reclassifications. The most recent occurrence was in 2018, when it was dragged out of one species and reallocated to another under the name The Malpas Bat. Unlike most other bats, Hardwicke's Forest Bat is something of a loner. It was named after the East India Company soldier, Major-General Thomas Hardwicke, a man as much noted for his love of natural history as for his determination to defeat Tipu Sultan in battles across India. Like many East India men, Hardwicke had a complicated domestic life, leaving behind five illegitimate children and two other daughters born to his Indian mistress.

S

Bats of Small Size

Eight bats populate Sri Lanka’s Small Bat category, their sizes averaging around 4 centimetres, with upper ranges for some of up to 6 centimetres. The Indian Pipistrelle stands out, despite its size, for its rampant fertility. Most bats give birth once a year – usually to a single pup. The Indian Pipistrelle, however, does this three times a year. Dull orange with a worrying tendency to beige, the Fulvus Roundleaf Bat follows bat reproductive norms more exactly, breeding in November, to produce a single pup who will take well over a year to gain sexual maturity. 

Little is known about the third XS bat, the Sri Lankan Leaf-Nosed Bat, as it was only identified as a new endemic species in 2025, its existence until then having been clumsily muddled up with other cousins and near cousins. Its tell-tale giveaways were its extra board nose, unusual ear shape, and a marginally different set of tiny head bones. 

The same sorry fate was to befall the Dekhan Leaf-Nosed Bat, which, until 2025, had been horribly confused with several other species to which it only had a nodding acquaintanceship. It is considered critically endangered, and most scientists believe it doesn’t actually exist in Sri Lanka at all. Most, that is, but not quite all. Such rarity does not haunt Schneider’s Leaf-nosed Bat, which lives in colonies of around 1000 mates in caves across Sri Lanka.

The Rufous Horseshoe Bat, beautifully orange though it is, remains one to be avoided, being responsible for the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak. Van Hasselt’s Mouse-Eared Bat  was named for the great biologist Johan Conrad van Hasselt, whose wretched reputation  was such that almost everyone who joined him for expeditions into the unknown died or returned with a terminal illness, himself included. 

His little bat is unusual for its fondness for living alone near water. More social is Cantor's Leaf-Nosed Bat, named for a Danish zoologist more famous for having nailed the taxonomic complexities of Siamese fighting fish. 

M

Bats of Medium Size

Four baths fill the medium-size bat category, though medium means little more than between 5 and 5.5 centimetres body length at most. Of the four, the stand-out star is the Sri Lankan Woolly Bat, firs...

The inexorable world will not stop its spin around the sun, nor Sri Lanka pause to knows this.  Even in our little town of Galagedera the news will affect just a few. But here on the estate, we all stop, deeply shocked, barely knowing how to react, or what to do next.

Chinta had been away from work for a day, complaining of being a little tired and dizzy, a state that was too easily put down to the occasional colds that come at this monsoon time of the year.  It little warned us that this was a far more significant symptom. 

But whatever the cause of her death, it is her life that I – and everyone else here – stops to really give thanks for.  As ever, I am at a loss to know exactly who to thank for it, but whoever it was who put her together – thank you.  Her life so effortlessly and so gladly enriched mine, and all of us here at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.  

Barely could Chinta look at someone else without smiling, the hint of a giggle almost always present on her lips.  It started my day, waking up, collecting the dogs for a walk, and coming across her, already at her tasks of getting the hotel ready for the day.  To be that positive and with such grace every day takes a very special talent for - and love of - life.  

She had worked here for years, following in her mother’s, Anulawathi’s, footsteps.  Anulawathi was one of the people we sort of inherited when we arrived, the rubber tapper of the estate trees, daily emptying the white latex from their coconut shells into a bucket that would be taken to the ancient 1940s rubber rollers (imported from Wolverhampton, and still running strong today) to be processed.  

At first Chinta worked on the estate, helping tame the jungle into more pliable plantations for pepper and spices.  When we opened the hotel, she moved across as a housekeeper, keeping the rooms and public spaces clean and orderly.  This task is always herculean - even when the hotel is closed, so great is the presage of nature in the jungle, the leaves, insects, pollen, and occasional over curious wild squirrels, birds monkeys.  To leave things for just 24 hours is to court the censure of all right minded Little Miss Tidys.  

Chinta could manage the unexpected as well as the predicable, and with equal calm - whether it was feeding six tiny puppies every three hours with a teat, cooking her in-demand village dishes for staff lunches or helping keep at bay the occasional massive swarms of day flies that can suddenly arrive on the back of a jungle monsoon.

I sometimes play the game of “if X was an animal, what animal would they be?”  And for Chinta it would have to be the loris.

There are a variety of lorises to choose from.  There is the Northern Ceylon Slender Loris, discovered as recently as 1932  in the Gammaduwa region of the Knuckles Range, with its very distinctive facial stripe. Just five years later yet another sub species was discovered, this time on Horton Plains - the Ceylon Mountain Slender Loris, in 1937 and barely seen since. The sweetest sounding is the Highland Ceylon Slender Loris, whose Tamil name - kada papa – means "baby of the forest".  Unlike its closest cousin the Loris Llydekkerianus Uva, its fur is redder in colour.

But for Chinta, the loris I have in mind is the beautiful Sri Lankan Red Slender Loris, slim, graceful, and modest as she ever was.  This loris is also the country’s most celebrated loris species, not least because it is just one of 24 endemic mammal species on the island.  It is a tiny, tree-living creature with heart-stoppingly adorable panda eyes. Like all lorises, it is a creature of the night, so unless you are a lucky insomniac you are unlikely to see them.  Its custom with its offspring (one that I am sure Chinta differed from) is to coat them in allergenic saliva, a toxin that repels predators - though Chinta was ever proud and protective of her two sons.  

Her commute was the sort of walk to work that most people can but dream about.  Chinta lived in one of the tiny hamlets that abut the estate, and from her home, overlooking paddy and a small river at the northern edge of the land, she would walk along a tiny narrow jungle track, its faint route scoured only by the daily tread of her feet.  She would have known every tree and bush, each creeper and family of monkeys that ran along her route.  I am sure that they would have given her as much joy as I get along my daily walk, albeit one at the end of five taut and tangled miniature schnauzer leads.  

I have never seen a loris on the estate but, at 1,000 feet, and given over to jungle and rich plantation, this is just the sort of place that lorises favour, sleeping in leaf covered tree holes by day and climbing through tree tops by night to gather the fruits, berries, leaves on which the feast.

Gratefully, we busy ourselves with the practical things, not least Angelo, the general manager, helping the family with the awesome and demanding requirements of a traditional funeral and alms giving.  This typically lasts for a week, during which time friends, family, neighbours, colleagues, and anyone associated with them will drop by the house to pay their respects and enjoy a cup of tea, cake, and biscuits. With hindsight, it is remarkable (though at the time it seems merely normal) just how everyone who can help, does so, in small practical ways.  Rarely does anyone ever die privately in Sri Lanka.  The country, especially in its more traditional country villages like the ones around us, still enjoys an extraordinary degree of community. This can cut differently, but at a time like this, seems to cut in an agile and nourishing fashion.

Briefly, I pause the day to day, and all the practical considerations that have suddenly become relevant, just to write this.  To say thank you to whichever Gods there are for the life of Chinta.

“Pepper vine, “ he finally ventured: “all entangled but makes you sneeze too.”

Politics was front of mind today. The country was having a major sneezing fit. Yesterday, London’s Channel 4 Dispatches broadcast a programme that alleged links between Muslim extremists and public figures close to two previous presidents. It also outlined an alleged plot to make a past presidential electoral victory a little more of a certain bet for one of them.

The consequent debate, and many calls to action begs the question: how do you understand island politics? Was there, I wondered, a simple exemplar, a symbol that, once grasped, unlocked the complexity of power to reval its real nature. For although I can see the obvious allergic associations in the noodles or spaghetti, neither quite captured the technicolour intricacy of Sri Lanka politics.

The inevitable post Perehera rains have descended with loving vengeance and the entire estate is vibrating softly with the sound of persistent warm dewy raindrops falling from like manna from heaven. It is comfort food season; spaghetti all the more inviting. 

But dodging the downpour as I ran into my office, a much more satisfying symbol suddenly filled my eyes - albeit so obscure as to defy every reasonable guess.

Yes.

An embroidered tapestry from Vietnam. That is what I saw. It hangs at the very back of my office, ten feet long and four feet wide. 

It is one of three I bought back in 2006 in Saigon, and dates back just 60 or 70 years before this.

It is made piecemeal style – (and with an unintended ironic nod to the once great enemy) like those famous patchwork quilts beloved of America’s early colonial settlers. Famously, the women of whole villages would sit together to sew the sort of bedcovers now beloved of Sotheby’s, Christies, and the American Museum of Folk Art. But is it art?

The more I looked at the tapestry, the more I wondered. Art or Craft? Politics in Sri Lanka, or merely a nice tapestry? 

Oxford, that doyen of definitions, describes art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”  Whilst there is no debating which side of the divide a Goya painting might fall, a dinner plate is moot, though Picasso made such items. And a Qing Dynasty Porcelain plate recently sold for $84 million. 

So was this tapestry art or craft?

At least 8 types of pre-made fabrics have been incorporated in this Vietnamese tapestry. Mostly rectangular, some squared. Some premade, all or mostly probably not made by the maker of this particular tapestry. So where is the art in it? 

The shapes are coloured red, yellow, golden, orange, and shot through with abstracted designs in black, blue, green, pink, and white. Glimpses of extravagant flowers share space with intricate geometric patterns. It sounds as if it cannot do anything other than offend the eye – yet it does quite the opposite. It glows like a golden fresco in a dark cave, a coherent whole made out of utterly dissimilar elements. 

And although it comes from Vietnam, it hails from a part of country that defies all borders: the Central Highlands. These mountain plateaus run from Vietnam into Loas and Cambodia. Their inhabitants – some 3 million – are ethnically different to the rest of Vietnam. Composed of 30 separate tribes - collectively called Montagnards – the language they speak have little in common with Vietnamese, still less with one another. And since records began in the 1st century BCE, they have largely resisted all attempts by any central government to dominate them.

The tapestry they made all those decades ago, and that I bought more recently was created to keep you warm, not to decorate a room. Yet the scraps of cloth that make it up have been assembled with apparent logical order. It is functional – and still displays both beauty and emotional power, as might any original abstract painting do. It is art concealed as craft. 

And there is the node with island politics: the splice point, cross point, connection socket, point of engagement. For politics here is an art concealed – in history, and family. 

The Oxford Dictionary is less helpful in defining politics than art. It describes politics as “the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power.”  But in Sri Lanka politics is but family concealed by the loosest of all sarongs. Parties run a poor second.

Since Independence the country’s main parties have been more than family-friendly: the Senanayake–Kotelawalas; the Bandaranaikes; the Wijewardene-Jayewardenes; and more recently, the Premadasas and Rajapaksas. Amongst the high positions of government, the president, prime minister and cabinet of ministers, daughters have succeeded mothers, brothers handed on to bothers; cousins to cousins. There is nothing spaghetti like about it: it is all as clearly laid out as any piece of tapestry from the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the art of ancestry, honed by generations that frames both power and government .

The oldest party, the UNP was the home of the Senanayake–Kotelawala and the Jayewardenes, and is still led by a relative of both, the current president, Ranil Wickremesinghe. It splintered in 2020 to form the SJB around Sajith Premadasa, himself son of a previous president. 

Its great rival, the SLFP was dominated by the Bandaranaikes until the Rajapaksas were elected to run it. When they themselves were defeated, the Rajapaksas left to remodel a smaller party, the SLPP into a born again SLFP. The 2022 Aragalaya protests that toppled the SLPP government and drove some 40 Rajapaksas family members out of office left many of the SLPP supporting the current UNP president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, along with sizable numbers of SJB and SLFP parliamentarians.

It is a fecund petrie-dish into which Channel 4 Dispatches have dropped their latest documentary, pursuing, to paraphrase the SLPP’s Namal Rajapaksa, a vendetta against his family – or igniting, according to leaders in other parties, the need for an international commission of investigation. 
The 2022 Aragalaya protests that toppled the Rajapaksa government also broke normal party politics. Political definitions have blurred. In family walauwas party leaders are cautiously positioning themselves for the 2024 presidential election, parties without leaders who can credibly win the election or leaders without parties who might. 

I gaze at my glowing Montagnard tapestry art, its blocks of colour and design artfully united into a single holistic cloth painting, seeing these families - grand as any ancient aristocratic dynasty from the west - through party political sunglasses. 

Like the Montagnards, they sit outside the everyday and break down into quite separate tribes too, each painting with a broad brush and considerable artistic licence.  Whatever the lens, the real landscape looks very much the same as ever it did despite the filter. But the question each family behind every political party now faces is that posed by a much more questioning electorate: can they still see the big picture or not? 

My tapestry may be art disguised as craft; and in its carefully placed blocks of apparently random fabric offer a helpful metaphor to understand island politics in terms of family units.

Fluttering with pride across a million or more flagpoles from banks to private houses, government buildings to temples, lions have also given their name to any number of other things - from Lion tea to Lion larger, from Mount Lavinia’s Lion Pub to Galagedera Royal Lion Hotel, from soaps, cars, jewellers, insurance sales forces and even pop groups down south in Henakaduwa. Statues of the beast also found their way into early temples, palaces, and monasteries -  unfloutable sentinels of the great buildings of the state. But quite how lions got here is a matter of simmering altercation amongst vexillologists. Some point the finger at Prince Vijaya, others at King Dutugemunu, and still others at King Nissan Kamalla. But whatever the truth of the matter, there is more to the lion than just flags or brand names. 

That lions should assume so central a role is a victory of sorts for Panthera Leo Sinhaleyus, a subspecies of the lion unique to Sri Lanka, which became extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as the island’s famous Stone Age Balangoda Man walked his own last steps. Its discovery only came to light in 1936, when the archaeologist P.E.P. Deraniyagala uncovered two fossilised teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of a forensic detective, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of exhumed teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying anything, but the other, a left molar, presented such a distinctive structure as to not just twin it with lions but also set it apart from all known lion species. The discovery was later validated by a further breakthrough in 1962, when a complete right-limb middle phalanx of the same species was found. From these fragile artefacts, a lost subspecies was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place from what it would become, an island of open grasslands – a habitat perfect for lions, and big ones at that. But over time, as the monsoon rain fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat became ever more restricted and at some point, the creature just died out. 

Today, the Sri Lankan lion’s paramount historical descendant sits at the feet of what islanders call the eighth wonder of the ancient world - Sigiriya Rock. This massive lump of granite - a hardened, much-reduced magma plug – is all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermit monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by King Kashyapa I (or his father) as the location of a new fortress capital in 477 CE.

Guarding the staircase to an ancient fortress, six hundred feet above, are the two immense animal paws, rediscovered during excavations in 1898, all that remains of a crouching sphinx-like lion that guarded the palace entrance. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place: “Sigiriya,” the Sinhala for “Lion’s Rock.” 

Gazing at it, the most irresistible connection is, of course, to the legendary Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II, recalled by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Sigiriya, like the palace of the King of Kings, is as much a ruin as the lion paws that yet defend it. Each mitten is a sorrowful remnant exemplifying the accepted and formidable face of authority and statehood. 

From King Pandu Kabhaya founding Anuradhapura around 437 BCE, thereby marking the tangible beginnings of the Sri Lankan island state, to the inheritance enjoyed by the first Moriyan king, Dhatusena, in 463 CE, 900 years of solid national building had been achieved. Over those many centuries, an entire kingdom and culture had been consolidated, and an ancient state had thrived. Under, first, the Vijayan, and then the Lankbranaka, dynasties, a one-state government came to dominate the entire island, its grand writ running through countless villages from north to south, east to west, by means of the intricate bureaucratic, legal, and administrative structures that ordered its religion, water resources, taxation, and trade. At every stage, this sophisticated ordering of society was reinforced by caste demarcations that arose at least as early as 543 BCE with the arrival of the founding father, Prince Vijaya. With him came a variety of castes, most notably the Govigama – the landowners. A complex and hereditary feudal system soon developed from this, its voluminous obligations derived from work ordered by the king – the Rajakariya - for an astonishingly comprehensive set of occupations from toddy tapping to coconut growing, hair cutting to fishing. The state's managed bureaucracy had hierarchies so finely tuned that they even trickled down to village officials tasked with managing sluice gates and tanks. The arrival of Buddhism in the 3rd century BCE fortified and compounded these meticulous arrangements.

That the state was strong – able to endure even the suicidal excesses of some of its kings, to shrug off occasional invasions, civil wars, and droughts – was in large part due to the enduring capabilities of the social order that underwrote the kingdom. This institutionalised aptitude allowed the nation to function when even, at times, the government itself did not. Even - all too often -  when the island’s very social order was manifestly unfair and destructive, it remained a firm and formative force. 

“Sure,” cried John Steinbeck’s tenant farmer, “but it’s our land…We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours.”  

Sri Lanka’s lion - most memorably exemplified by that built by the early Moriyan kings at Sigiriya - is an apt symbol of this decisive national trait, one so critical that it helps explain another key reason for what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan: not just Buddhism, nor its early radical water technology, or even its singular island status – but its ability to, as Winston Churchill put it, “keep buggering on.”  For the lion, grand and majestic though it is, is first and foremost resistant. Nothing defeats it.

Never before the Moriyan kings had taken the throne had buggering on been such an imperative national trait. As the twenty-five monarchs of this third dynasty vacillated through their (usually brief) reigns, the state’s rulers became increasingly dependent on mercenaries to maintain control. The dynasty’s third king, Moggallana, made this something of a sine qua non when he overthrew his half-brother, King Kashyapa, with the help of mercenaries. He was not the first Anduraupuran king to do this: Ilanaga in 33 CE and Abhayanaga in 231 CE had done much the same. But in the M...

The crown upgrade is very straightforward. Get a sapphire.  There is nothing a sapphire cannot put right - for no stone sits more sumptuously on head, hand, or breast than the sapphire. The Sri Lankan sapphire, to be exact. 

Quite apart from the orgone light that illuminates its wearers, it is, if some sapphire traders are to be believed, a not inconsequential medical aid. Claims that it helps combat cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic – to name but a few – are widespread, albeit untested.

Buddhists have long since taken this positive attitude to the stone one big step further, believing that sapphire accelerates spiritual enlightenment. Ellen Conroy, in her seminal 1921 book “The Symbolism of Colour”, quoted Buddhist texts that claimed the jewel produced peace of mind and equanimity: “it chases out evil thoughts by establishing healthy circulation. It opens barred doors to the spirit. It produces a desire for prayer. It brings peace, but he who would wear it must lead a pure and holy life.”  

Like the claim for curing cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic, this claim, winsome though it is, is also untested.

It is, say some Buddhists, nothing less than the transformative third eye – the one that symbolises clarity and insight, so enabling you to see beyond plain earthly things.

Less happily, the Chinese, traders with the island since ancient times, believed that sapphires were the congealed tears of Buddha - though this was not how Cleopatra was reputed to see the stone, using it with lavish application ground up in her eye shadow.

Clearly, though, the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires is deep and well beyond most measures of what is ancient. Gem mining here reaches back to at least the second century BCE, with the mention of a gem mine in The Mahavamsa, one of the island’s most ancient chronicles. However, if biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems are to be believed, the country’s mines can be dated back at least another 700 years. 

25% of its total land area is gem-bearing, mostly around Ratnapura and, to a lesser extent, Elahera. Thanks to the extreme age of its rocks (90% are between 500 and 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous that they often wash out onto floodplains and into rivers and streams. 

Its waterfalls would make Cartier wince. Indeed, the mining of alluvial deposits by simple water-winnowing river mining was for long the classic technique used to find gemstones. Nowadays, brutalist earthmovers excavate the topsoil; though tunnel mining is mildly kinder to the environment, with pits 5 to 500 feet deep dug and tunnels excavated horizontally from them. 

Sales of Sri Lanka’s gems boomed from a trifling $40 million in 1980 to over $473 million in 2022, a phenomenal acceleration promoted by two bouts of unusually effective government intervention: the establishment of the State Gem Corporation in 1971 and the 1993 Gem and Jewellery Authority Act. 

With these moves, the government centralised and professionalised the issuance of gem-mining licenses and the leasing of government land for mining. They extended control over sales and exports and made it mandatory that gems discovered in mines be presented at public auctions, with the government receiving a 2.5% share of sales. 

The industry’s value chain is almost as long as a piece of thread. Gem miners sell their stones to dealers, who sell to other dealers, who sell the rough rocks to cutter-polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors, descendants of Arab traders. The stones are then sold on to wholesalers and then retailers. And then to auctioneers, who often resell the rocks back to other consumers, or to retailers who resell them to new consumers. And so on, down all the ages of recorded time.

But of all its many types of Sri Lankan gems, mined in apparent inexhaustible plenty, it is sapphires that anyone with the merest hint of glitter associates with the country. Eighty-five per cent of the precious stones mined on the island are sapphires.

Blue as the morning, the ocean, the sky, sapphire, is most commonly red, purple, pink, gold, and lavender – the colour variety depending on the stone’s chemical composition. 

Its green sapphires are addictively distinctive, but the island also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires. This yellow sapphire is apparently a good deterrent against witchcraft, as well as orange and white ones. And it is famous for a variant known as a padparadscha sapphire – from Padmaraga - a pink-orange stone, as converted as the grail or meaning of life.

But despite all this, the colour that gets the most acclaim is – of course - the Blue Sapphire, the blue of inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, blue sapphires are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”.

Long before Loos got round to writing “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the country’s sapphires were the go-to gem for crowns, thrones, diadems, and later, accessories for First Nights and cocktail parties – and just to feeling special curled up in front of the television with a hot chocolate and a sapphire ring. Harly surprising then that over the centuries, eighteen of the island’s sapphires have won for themselves an ineradicable place in the hearts of collectors, connoisseurs, aficionados, enthusiasts, and experts. And, of course, auctioneers.

Despite being made to be worn, flaunted, and noticed, all but two of the country’s most famous sapphires are either trapped in museums or lost to the public eye. 

One of the two you can see still worn is the Stuart Sapphire, last sported by Charles III at his coronation in Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May 2023. Arguments – all but improvable – rage gently over this 104-carat stone that sits, God, at the top of the British crown, surrounded by supplicant diamonds. Is it from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, India, or Burma? Most experts reckon it is from Sri Lanka, but its provenance is obscure, and it can only be reliably dated to Charles II and his brother, the hapless exile, James II.  

Less controversial is the only other famous island sapphire still worn in public today - the Princess of Wales’s Engagement Ring. Compared to the other notable sapphires given by Sri Lanka to the world, Princess Diana’s Engagement Ring, now worn by the current Princess of Wales, Catherine, is best described as small but perfectly formed. 

A mere twelve carats, this oval ring rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for his future wife, Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981. Her elder son later inherited it and, at some point between 2010 and 2011, resized it to fit the finger of his own fiancée, Kate Middleton, a brilliant blue reminder of Sri Lanka in any of the millions of photographs published of her around the world every week.

But...

And they are lovely: very lovely. Well worth doing. But there’s more. Much more. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was perfect,” noted Moses with satisfaction in Genesis, and he must surely have had Sri Lanka in mind. Because what is special – most beautiful of all – is its ordinary life. The life you notice while driving its roads or walking its streets. 

And it is all that enables this life that is the subject of this little, most local of tours, a tuk tuk drive from Sri Lanka’s jungle retreat, The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This journey will take you behind the door of what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lanka – those aspects of life that matter most to most people: god, food, water, culture, education, crafts, and local lords. These are the things that motor this little Sri Lankan community, perched in the jungle and paddy on the edge of the highlands, as it does most others. As Bad Bunny, the rapper, said, “Simple goes a long way.”  Especially here, far from the busy world. 

History has the hardest of times being heard in a tropical climate, which is no respecter of artefacts. Much has been lost. The haunting story of Dingiri Menika in Galagedera exemplifies this—the fate of this renowned local beauty is intertwined with that of Kandy’s last king. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of the last King of Kandy, Queen Dingiri Menika was kidnapped by his soldiers, garlanded with jasmine, and carried on elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake atop Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, now home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. 

Bound to a stake, she was meant to be a human sacrifice, though quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first, rescued her, married her, in fact, and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years, he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of whom was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees. Traces of the king remain in the museum in Kandy, but of the Galagedera home that housed his beautiful would-be sacrifice, there is none.

Yet the world she inhabited is not yet gone, and this tour will try to pick out which aspects of it still live on. We will visit Mrs Liyange and the tiny preschool class of tiny singing children at the ancient monastic school of Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. And Manju and his family beside their paddy fields and figure out all that happens to our sticky rice pudding before it gets to be anything of the sort. We will finger inscriptions so ancient they predate recorded Sri Lankan history with a script that fell out of use nearly two thousand years ago, when we call in on Gunadaha Rajamaha. This cave altar was the refuge of a king who symbolised the enduring and unique culture of the Sinhala nation that is Sri Lanka today, and who rescued the young Anuradhapura Kingdom.  En route is a handloom workshop and a woodcarver, part of a great artistic tradition for which the Kandyan kingdom is famed. And an abandoned manor house dating back to the first years of British occupation. 

2

THE KING’S HIDING PLACE

Hidden down tiny roads very close to the hotel is the ancient cave temple of Gunadaha Rajamaha, its lofty views and deep forest hinterland once home to one of Sri Lanka's most unlucky kings. Valagamba became King of Anuradhapura in 103 BCE, but had first to kill Kammaharattaka, his sibling’s murderer and chief general, before gaining what he regarded as his birthright - the crown.

This he did, but little good came of it. Decades earlier, royal misrule had set the grand old kingdom of Anuradhapura on a path to utter disaster. Within months of taking power, a rebellion broke out in Rohana due to a devastating drought. The kingdom’s preeminent port, Mantota, across the Mannar Strait, fell to Dravidian Tamil invaders. And at a battle at Kolambalaka, the hapless King Valagamba was defeated, racing from the battlefield in a chariot lightened by the (accidental?) exit of his wife, Queen Somadevi. 

The king went into continual hiding - including here in Galagedera as he sought to build a guerrilla resistance to the invaders. His kingdom was now ruled by a series of Tamil kings who, between 103 BCE and 89 BCE, were either to murder one another or fall victim to the guerrilla campaign that now became ex-king Valagamba’s passion and priority. 

For 10 years of war, regicide, and rebellion cripped the land. The first three Tamil kings murdered one another, and Valagamba’s successful guerrilla campaign killed the final two.

By 89 BCE, he had recaptured the throne/. He was to rule for a further 12 years, but his religious preoccupations, perhaps magnified by his long periods of hiding out in temple caves, set in motion the island’s first Buddhist schism.

Over the following hundreds of years, the ancient little temple carried on; its caves gathering statues; its forest getting ever denser; and the walls of the rock within which it hides being chiselled with medieval drains to fend off the monsoon. 

Today it remains a place for solitude and prayer; a moment of stillness to carry with you, the lintel above the cave itself inscribed with a pre-Singhalese script – Brahmi, an alphabet that dates back to the 6th BCE in India.

3

TEMPLE, SCHOOL, MUSEUM, PEACE

A temple of a quite different sort is next on the tour. 

There is no agreed word to describe a hunger for temples, but any such human condition is most easily put to rest in Sri Lanka, the island that averages a temple or kovil every three miles or so. Ancient, famous, revered, enormous, historic, picking out just one to especially favour is no easy task. But the one I would pick out, for its abiding spirit of serenity, its simple good work, its connection to its community, and its halcyon calm, is Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. 

Found off a tiny back road just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, the temple is around 400 years old, dating back to King Rajasinha II, the collapse of the Portuguese occupation of the island, and the arrival of the Dutch.

Within its grounds lie a lovely elongated mini stupa, over 100 years old; a dormitory for its monks; ponds of koi carp, a range of Buddhist alters; a Museum; public rooms for workshops and eating; a medical facility; and the ancient temple itself.

It is overseen by Udawela Nanda Thero, whose kind and thoughtful character is almost all the argument you need to believe in the goodness of God. Half a century old, his family have presided over the temple since its earliest beginnings. Someone once said that anyone who loves books, dogs, and trees cannot be faulted for their essential goodness. And so it is here. Udawela Nanda Thero goes about his daily work, followed by his three adoring dogs, who ta...

Suspicion, jealousy, alcohol and an excess of testosterone were just some of the other apparent ingredients found in that fateful dinner. A husband deeply suspicious of his wife’s fidelity; his acid distrust of his young son’s real paternity – it all came together in a grisly act of filicide. Murdering his uncertain heir, the man cooked and served up his tiny body to his wife.

Although murdering one’s child is relatively common (in America, for example, there are some 2000 cases per year), combining the appalling deed with fine dining is so rare as to be almost unparalleled. Yet, according to one of Sri Lanka's most dogged folk myths, this is precisely what occurred in that jungle one terrible night.

Unhinged by grief, the mother fled screaming into the forest, where the gods, exhibiting that kind of double-edged kindness that all ancient gods seem to excel at. They turned her into a bird – the ulama, or devil bird, or, to be still more exact, what is thought to be the Sri Lankan Spot-bellied Eagle Owl.

In his book “Seeing Ceylon,” published in 1965, the remarkable Renaissance Burger, R. L. Brohier, surveyor, historian and the driving force behind the Gal Oya Reservoir, the island’s largest water tank, famously described the “clucking strangling sobs” the bird makes - “a scream which froze the blood”, “a series of dreadful shrieks as if coming from a soul in great agony of torment.”

For so ghoulish and intemperate a description, this one has the rare advantage of being accurate. The owl’s call really does sound as if a small infant is being murdered, or his mother is wailing with inconsolable wretchedness. Long after the owl has flown away, the sound stays with you, not unlike a spicy meal itself or as if Beethoven’s Fifth had become entangled with Heavy Metal and once heard, never forgotten. 

The owl itself is enormous – the sixth largest in the world, with a wingspan approaching six feet. Despite this, it is rarely seen, being not only almost wholly nocturnal but also sticking to the most impenetrable parts of extensive forests. Spotted in such places as Yala, Wilpattu, and Sinharaja, it has also been seen and – of course – heard in Kurunegala, Kandy, and Galagedera, with one dropping in with alarming mateyness several nights a year at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.

Its visual coyness is a great pity for the bird, which is something of a looker, resembling a ghostly and very aristocratic dowager, given to looking at the world with quizzical mistrust, its ashy white feathers picked out with dark highlights like the ermine Robe of State worn by British monarchs at their coronation. What betters any monarch is in its gorgeous horizontal ear tufts, which can be around 3 inches in length, making the bird’s head appear as if it has a pair of assistant wings of its own, a living, breathing Douglas DC-4.

Zealous vegetarians they are not, their diet consisting of meat, more meat, and then still more, in all shapes and sizes – from tiny cowering rodents to recorded feasts involving civets, jackets, deer, and even monkeys. They pass their carnivorous inclinations onto their young from the start, raising them on meat before taking them off for short hunting trips to learn the juicy arts of entrapment.

Thankfully, civilisation’s perpetual intrusions have had little impact on their status, and they are widely recorded by numerate ornithologists – this even though mating pairs tend to lay but a single egg a year. Sri Lanka marks the southernmost limit of their territory, which extends north to the Himalayas and east to Vietnam, making it, if not endemic to the island, then at least fully paid-up residents. Even so, they stand as something of a standard-bearer for the island’s owls in general, not just for their audacious glamour and history, but also that something quite so vast should live with such surreptitious ease in the modern world. 

In this, they are not alone. 

Almost 500 bird species have been recorded on the island, although arguments rage over how many are endemic to Sri Lanka. Experts argue that only somewhere between 34 and 23 are truly endemic – a mere 5 or 6 per cent of the avian population. 

To put this in context, the authoritative International Ornithologists' Union classes 255 birds worldwide as owls of one kind or another. Looked at from this perspective, Sri Lanka is something of a high achiever - a country that has 0.01% of the world’s land mass hosts 0.8% of its endemic owl species. Altogether, the island is home to 12 owl species, nine of which are resident in other Asian countries, particularly around the Indian subcontinent, and one is a tourist.

Of these nine, the Brown Wood Owl most resembles its ulama peer, being almost as large and with a cry that – if not murderous – is loud and distinctive, somewhere between a bark and a scream, the exact sound being subtly different according to their passing nationality. Found in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Taiwan, and southern China, as well as Sri Lanka, their calls vary from soft and low in India to decidedly more forceful in Indonesia. Like the Devil Bird, it seems untroubled by the bellicose excesses of human impositions, being categorised as a species under no significant existential threat – though it likes to hide in deep forest, making its public appearances at night. Its plumage, brown on top but with wavy brown-white streaks on its belly, is no less lovely for coming from the Marks and Spencer’s end of feather fashion.

Just as brown as the Brown Wood Owl is the Brown Fish Owl, a species common throughout south and southeast Asia but which has inspired a healthy range of subspecies, the Sri Lankan version of which teeters on the giddy, celebrated edge of endemism. It is smaller and darker than its other fish owl cousins, about two feet in length and with an unremarkable white-brown plumage, not unlike a much-loved duffle coat. Its fondness for fish means it is most easily spotted around coastlines, lakes, and rivers, but it is also regularly reported in the deeper jungle. It found its way into western taxonomy through a drawing made by a Dutch colonist on the island, which was included in 1776 in an illustrated zoology book by Peter Brown, a London-based Danish conchologist and friend of Captain Cook’s great botanist, Joseph Banks. The picture’s inclusion in a book published by a professor in Göttingen some decades later pushed the little owl into the European mainstream, where Linnaeus himself seized on it for his groundbreaking “Systema Naturae,” the birthplace of modern scientific classification systems.

Like the Brown Fish Owl, the Sri Lankan bay owl is another owl that teeters on the festive cusp of endemism. There are only two variants of this species recognised globally: one from India’s Western Ghats and the other from Sri Lanka. Whilst scientists continue to argue about whether or not the Sri Lankan variant should be promoted into a recognized and distinctive separate species or not, the bird itself goes about its life with relative happiness, slightly but not too disastrously threatened by habitat loss, its democratic liking for homes as varied as cloud a tropical jungle and open grasslands, ens...

This longer of the two walks, which we call THE ESTATE WALK, starts at THE PODI PATH just outside the front porch that leads into the hotel. 

A traditional kitchen constructed of mud and bamboo once stood on this path, managed by Podemenike, whose life roughly and remarkably followed that of independent Sri Lanka. Around 1950, she began work on the estate as a lady’s maid. It was just a few years after independence, and she stayed on to help protect the estate once the family fled after the 1987 JVP Uprising. 

This violent Marxist-Leninist insurrection almost toppled the then government of President Premadasa. For over two years, a state of near anarchy dominated life, with militant riots, mass executions, and assassinations affecting most areas of the island. Pro and anti-government militias added to the battle, the casualties of which, Human Rights Watch eventually estimated at 35,000 – a figure no sides yet agree on.

It wasn’t the first such uprising. 

In 1971, a similar insurrection occurred, this time against the Bandaranaike government, though its fatalities were considered lower. But the 1987 rebellion was the first truly island-wide event to profoundly affect the estate, leading to its abandonment by all except Podemenike and two elderly croppers, who were understandably fond of arrack. It was a terrible time for the country, and although Podemenike’s kitchen has long since gone, as you walk down this little path, you may, at least in your imagination, still catch the smell of real village cooking - warm spices and buttery rice.

THE PODI PATH cuts through a pepper plantation, arriving soon at a flight of steps on the left just before THE SPICE KITCHEN. Herein lies the entrance to THE KITCHEN GARDEN, with two special trees coming into touch on the right. The first of these is a Cannonball Tree or Sal Tree.

This is a mighty and magnificent wonder, with pink, white architectural flowers like half-open lids that give off one of the most perfumed and refined scents you are ever likely to encounter on this good earth. It grows to over one hundred feet, and the flowers eventually turn into seeds the size of cannonballs that hang off the main stems of the tree like a wayward artillery store.

The tree comes from South America and is the source of adamantly held confusions. Buddhists believe that Lord Buddha was born in a garden of sal trees in Lumbini in distant Nepal. 

But the Cannonball or Sal tree, which grows in Sri Lanka, only arrived in South Asia in the 1880s. The first one to have a detailed record is the one in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, planted on the 14th of April 1901 by George V and his wife, Queen Mary. 

Given the extreme botanical spectacle that this tree is, it is no surprise that it has come to be conflated with the sal Lord Buddha would have known – Shorea robusta, a smaller tree with little flowers and no fragrance. I hesitate to boast and brag, but the inevitable conclusion from comparing our Cannonball Tree with King George’s is that ours, being much larger, must predate 1901. 

Beside it is what looks like a Breadfruit tree. Or possibly a jacktree? Actually, it is both – a rare hybridising that occurred entirely naturally between these related species. 

The relationship coach, Laura Doyle, famed, at least in California, for her trademarked “Six Intimacy Skills,” remarked that “Only God is perfect. For the rest of us, there are apologies.”  

And so it is for our Kitchen Garden. Invaded nightly by hungry porcupines; several times by a small herd of 20 wild boar, and often at the mercy of deer, squirrels, and monkeys, it is a wonder it ever produces any herbs or vegetables. 

Even so, we limp on, brave as Obi-Wan Kenobi, planting organic wonders that will flourish all the better once we finally get around to fencing in the entire acre. The happier plants grow in a large greenhouse, mostly soft vegetables and herbs. The area is surrounded by shade nurseries, home to hundreds of hand-reared trees, destined for timber plantations or our rare trees arboretum.

Returning to the steps up which you first came to enter the kitchen garden, you then pass, on your left, THE SPICE KITCHEN. 

This modest building was made in the traditional way as a Pandemic project in 2021 by our whole team, using bamboo, mud, and leftovers. It is the place for staff teas and lunches, as well as a creche. Part of the building is used to process latex, the raw white juice extracted from the estate rubber trees, which is then half-dried and rolled on machinery made in Wolverhampton in the 1940s. 

At the building’s end is another flight of steps, this one leading up into THE HOCKIN SPICE GARDEN. The path through the spice garden is circular, eventually returning you to this point. 

And now you are in the Estate’s private spice garden, planted with cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cloves, turmeric, and ginger and named for two sassy polyamorous Methodist family cousins who lived, ménage à trois, with a German POW on their remote Cornish farm for 50 years. Their three graves, side by side, overlook the sea near Morwenstow. 

The only graves here, however, are those of the three estate elephants, their limitless night songs still heard in the hearts of those best able to join in the occasional elephant Séance.

The vanilla vines we grow in THE HOCKIN’S SPICE GARADEN are descendants of the 19th-century plants the British brought to the island, hoping to eclipse the commercial success the plant enjoyed in Madagascar. 

But it was not to be. Fastidious, fussy, and economical, it never amounted to much even though vanilla experts commend the unusual taste that Sri Lankan vanilla has evolved to produce - “a more complex flavour profile with delicate sweetness, subtle floral notes, and hints of cherry and caramel,” or so they say. 

Hand pollinated with the sort of brushes favoured by watercolourists of the more exquisite schools, it is nevertheless a bit of a hidden gem – and one that offers plenty of opportunities to practice patience. The cloves, cinnamon, and pepper planted alongside it are far more robust and withstand any amount of animal attack. But the turmeric and ginger tubers have to be husbanded carefully, for they offer wild boar treats of almost libidinous pleasure and excess.

Getting back to the main path from its entrance point, THE PODI PATH then leads through a large plantation of pepper vines, growing gleefully up glericidia poles. Gliricidia is the perfect plant for this, being fast-growing and erect, and pumping the surrounding soil with lots of nitrogen. It is also much used as a living fence.

The path moves on through jackfruit and clove trees and past THE ELEPHANT’S GRAVEYARD. Marked by Ceylon Oak or Koan Tree, the estate’s three elephants lie beneath it. The last elephant died in 1977, a few years after standing very firmly on her mahout. The plant itself is sis even longer living, and this one is about 130 years old.

All around it are more Jackfruit trees, some wild with smaller leaves and others more domesticated with larger crinkled leaves and more abunda...

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...

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...

It was 5.49 am and it rang out, sonorous, low, loud but not noisy.  Mellow.  Rather beautiful.  Almost bewitching.  A thing of the night, heard in the day.  Just like Gay Pride, sounding out exactly where it shouldn’t.  

This is June, so the season of Pride marches is lighting up so-so diary pages of many souls within the good globe’s silent minority.  

The owl was certainly late to bed.  Most other creatures were already up – excepting the monkeys that is, who – like languid diplomats – were still reaching for their jungle equivalent of morning croissants and in-bed latte – before deigning to recognise that the day had started.

But started it certainly had.  And the owl’s lateness to bed made me feel guilty on its behalf.  Had it been to an all-night owl party?  Back from the wing version of a long road trip?  Insomnia?  Nightmares that stopped it risking sleep?  

Guilt manages to seep into almost everything.  And Owl Pride is clearly this wise rejoinder to this nonsense, night sounding by day.  Of course, many Pride events have now become Mega Pride Happenings, planned months ahead like coronations or music festivals with corporate sponsors and ticketed events.  You can buy Pride candles, Pride mortgages, Pride bed accessories, Pride cakes, Pride phone condoms, and pretty much anything else so badged.  But when the assembled marchers sing Tony Robinson’s legendary anthem “Sing if you’re glad to be gay,” it is really just the chorus that is appreciated, blasted out like “Rule Britannia”.  The bitterly ironic other verses about violence, humiliation, and injustice, are washed away, no longer understood today.

It’s an awfully long way from Stonewall, 1969, when the New York gay community just randomly fought back one night after an especially egregious piece of police harassment. Their defiance and courage set off a mighty avalanche.  All the Prides worldwide stem from that, and the best are still the most local, in tiny towns and villages rather some borrowed city.  In these very local spaces people claim the right to be themselves in exactly their own streets and homes.  Not unlike my little jungle owl this morning.  

I say little, but it’s quite possible he is tiny and very good at sound projection.  

The authoritative International Ornithologists' Union classes 255 birds worldwide as owls of one kind or another. Looked at from this perspective my Sri Lankan owl  is a member of a very high achieving club.  Sri Lanka has but 0.01% of the world’s land mass yet hosts 0.8% of its endemic owl species.

In a country that has been repeatedly invaded by Cholas, Tamils, Dutch, Portuguese, British – even the Danish at one point - endemic is something of a debating point and the owl world is no less alive to this controversy than the human one.  Whilst some Sri Lankans claim there are but two endemic species; others claim it is actually three.  

Both camps take great pride in the endemic Sri Lankan Serendib Scops Owl. It is a species new to science since just 2004, and, as a rainforest night roamer, is almost impossible to see.

Its detection was a long drawn out process for Deepal Warakagoda, the Sri Lankan ornithologist, and a pioneer in natural history sound recordings. He first noted its sounds in 1995 - for it emitted the most distinctive quivering notes. It was not until 2001 that he actually saw the creature. “It was just after dawn that the first-ever observations of the species were made, in a flashlight beam, at the Sinharaja rainforest,” he wrote.  It took until 2004 before sufficient further research had been done to justify naming the discovery as a totally new species of bird – the first since 1868, when the Sri Lanka Whistling-Thrush was described. 

The other endemic owl on which there is broad agreement for its endemic-ness, is the Chestnut-backed Owlet , a small stocky fellow barely 8 inches long; but one that is at least more visible for it can be seen often during the day and into the early evening. 

But it is over the third owl, the Sri Lanka Bay Owl, that eager taxological arguments rage about its status and endemic-ness – for this owl apparently calls both Kerela and Sri Lanka home. It is something of  a beauty.  Coming in at around 10 inches in length, with a white feathered body and gorgeous white disc of a face, its eye area is picked out in darker feathers as if it has visited a Beauty Salon specialising in Baroque eye brows and eye lashes.  It is more than likely that my Pride owl today was such a one, beautifully if not outrageously dressed, singing away day or night, proud to be an owl.  

But it’s just as likely that he was in fact one of the non-endemic species that have passed the challenging Sri Lankan Department of Immigration citizenship tests to become firmly resident in the country. 

The Brown Fish Owl, more fondly known as the Brown Boobook, is one of these Resident Aliens.  Some 13 inches in length, it is one of the most commonly seen owls, happily urbanised. 

But if trying to decide on which owl was mine by its call alone, I might opt for the Brown Wood Owl.  This species is large (17 inches in length) and though shy has loud, reverberating hoots.  It is a real Owl’s Owl - large serious black eyes set off within a frame of white feathers on darker ones.   Cuter, though smaller (10 inches in length) are the Collared Scoups Owl or its cousin, The Indian Scoups Owl.  Both come complete with those delightful tell-tale ears or head tufts - like Yoda in Star Wars - that give it the appearance of being able to listen to your every problem

Two last Resident Aliens make up the island’s Owl tally.  The Barn Owl, seen everywhere, is more often heard first for it has an ear-shattering shriek that it enjoys drawing out to its fullest extent.  

But nothing beats the Spot-bellied Eagle Owl. This massive raptor, some 3 feet in length is the world’s sixth largest owl; and well distributed in Sri Lanka’s forests. Its grey and white markings make it easy to spot and the ledge-shaped tufts that lie horizontally over its eyes gives it a learned and quizzical look. But it is its savage, human-sounding shrieks that has granted it the greatest notoriety, for on the island it is also known as the Devil Bird and its cry is said to portend death.

Neither of these two are likely to have been my little Pride Owl.  

As I write, Coco’s six tiny puppies chewing my feet, Bertie barking at the giant squirrels in the Ebony Tree, the Owl has moved on.  I like to think of it in its tree hole, feet up, sipping a cocoa laced with whiskey, a trail of glittering clothes strewn across the floor.  He is getting ready for bed.  He has done his thing.  He has hooted when least expected, and claimed his rightful place.

A thinking space.  And a very agreeable one, as I give four of the five dogs their early morning walk.  The only distractions are monkeys, which have the schnauzers pulling on leads like charioteer horses at the Circus Maximus.  

It was a counting day this morning as I checked the leafy path to see how many more showy, and indulgent trees I could still shoehorn into the vista.

And as two plus two inevitably takes you to four, counting led me rapidly to the crumbling mathematics of mortality.  It has been a challenging time.  Two close relatives and three friends dead in quick succession.  “It makes you wonder,” said Ann Patchett presciently, “all the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.” Or, she might have added, if we had made time.

My private calculations shows a fifth of my life devoted to childhood, education, entertainment, and the odd dash of character-building psychosis thrown in (therapists might argue that this is too modest a fraction).  Thereafter two fifths devoted to toil and struggle, mortgages, money, doer-uppers, friends and family, travel, endless travel, shopping (I’m ashamed to say), and yet more work, and work.

The Bible gives seventy years as the cut off, but concedes eighty “by reason of strength.” So assuming I qualify, that gives me the last two fifth for – what?

Of course – today - for many 80 is just a beginning.  Many of my incipient octogenaric friends wear their decades like a feather boa, flicking this way and that: a game of tennis here, a city break there; magnums and yoga all the way.  But for others, it’s the start of the Great Decline.  When you reap the benefits (or not) of having looked after yourself a bit better in the previous 20 years or so.  

And, as my sorrowful tally of deaths suggest, these mathematics are arbitrary.  Fit, healthy and ambitious one day.  Dead the next.  No warning.  That’s it.  Done and dusted.  Stuff left undone – too bad.  You are due somewhere else, and only the luckless wait in the waiting room.  

If it doesn’t really bear thinking about, not thinking about it is even more difficult.  

Launching and running a jungle hotel in the Sri Lanka highlands keeps inertia at bay; though the read credit is down to Angleo and the amazing team here.  They keep the porcelain plates spinning no matter how many times wild boar eat through the water pipes, or the country itself wobbles (Easter bombings, COVID, Aragalaya).  

But as others declutter and kick back, chill out, and denest, take up golf, grandkids and climb the Monroes, here the opposite looms larger.  Sri Lanka is reverting to normal, guests return to the hotel, and the prodigal work of taming wild plantations, planting arboretums, gardens, of building staff bedrooms, spas, cabañas and so on returns, gladdening the heart.

But it is not – quite - enough, not when you consider the mathematics of mortality.  

So I thought to tell a story too –  Scheherazade like (with its mortality motivator).  Sri Lanka has an remarkable story to tell and a compelling one to research, and disseminate.  Despite the Tourist Board’s best efforts, it remains something of a well-kept secret.  Before COVID, 40 million tourists went to Thailand, 26 million to Malaysia and over 4 million to Burma.  Ten million fetched up in India, but just a stone’s throw away, barely 20% of that number reach these shores – roughly the same figure as went to the Maldives.

Travellers see bits of Sri Lanka; and natives their part of the whole.  Argument rage about what it really is; though it is, of course, everything that it is.  Every last fragment.  

And there are many. The country has rarely done things by the book.  Contrary and creative, it created a tropical Versailles whilst other countries were still experimenting with wattle and daub.  When the Cold War ended, its own war began. It has absorbed, synthesised, and repurposed everything that has come its way, welcome or not, into a singular Sri Lankanness.  

It is an attempt to document some of this; to make its history, fauna, flora, culture, topography, art, literature, mood, and manor more accessible that sits behind www.theceylonpress.com, the online publishing website that will take up much of the remaining two fifths of my fair portion of living.  I would hate to hauled out before it is at least reasonably complete.  If I am lucky to go out feet first, I will be clutching a keyboard and half a dozen marked up research papers from JSTOR, my thinking space much enriched.

For centuries, this was the island’s most magnificent building. The king had his architects draw up no-limit plans for an opulent palace-monastery, two hundred feet long, rising nine stories, each story punctured by a hundred windows. Observers spoke of the entire edifice containing a thousand rooms – an obvious exaggeration, but one that was not really required. For the building was, by any standards, a masterpiece. 

Inside the vast structure, golden pillars held up the roof of a special throne hall, its centrepiece an ivory throne centred between the titanic images of a golden sun, a moon and stars picked out in silver and pearls. The gilded roof glinted so fiercely in the sunlight that it could be seen from miles away. No expense was spared in its furnishings either. Even the water basins for washing feet and hands at its entrance were said to be of gold. 

Each floor of the building was given over for the use of monks in varying stages of sanctification as they travelled the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. Naturally, the lowest floor, the Buddhist equivalent of Perfumes & Make Up in a Department Store, was reserved for those who had yet to achieve anything. If not quite the habitat of the hoi polloi, it was not that far off either. 

The second floor, however, was allocated for those who had mastered the Tripitaka – three texts in the Buddhist Pali Canon, primarily concerned with doctrinal requirements and monastic rules.

It was only on reaching the third floor of this extraordinary structure that you could encounter monks who had made a real step change, for these had attained Sotapatti, the first stage of sanctification – an achievement made possible by having trounced indecision and an obsession with individuality, and rituals. 

The fourth floor was populated by monks who had contributed to this achievement by making serious inroads into eradicating all tendencies towards ill-will. And, more importantly, any thoughts of sensuality.

On the fifth floor lived the Anagamin monks – those who were now seeking to overcome pride, restlessness, ignorance, fine things, and immaterial cravings to become an arhat. And above them all, in the upper stories of this temple of gold, lived the Arahats themselves. This lofty station, the goal of all practising Buddhists, was reserved for those who have finally achieved Nirvana. Not for them the irksome and interminable cycle of rebirth.

Despite the building burning down, it was faithfully rebuilt in all its brilliance by King Saddha Tissa, Dutugemunu’s brother. Further repairs were carried out 120 years later, and a pavilion decorated with gemstones was added. But by the time of King Siri Naga I, sometime after 195 CE, the repairs carried out on this and other buildings in Anuradhapura were noticeably more modest in their goals. 

Buildings such as this one were made good, but reduced in size and scope, the easier for maintaining, perhaps, or maybe because there was just insufficient money to keep them as they had been first envisioned. It was, in its own grey and mildly dispiriting way, a metaphor for its time.

Today, you need a rich imagination and a keen sense of history to imagine how the Brazen Palace would have looked – even in Siri Naga I’s time. Destroyed eight hundred years later in the tenth century by Tamil invaders, it is today reduced to one thousand six hundred granite columns set in forty rows – all that survives of its once colossal walls. 

As Shelley might have said had he added Sri Lanka to his well-documented French, Swiss, German, Dutch, and Irish holidays: “nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,” stretch yet more ruins, scrub, and jungle.

Sri Lanka’s fifth great wonder is a mystery. Perishable, yet still found in almost every island household at some point in any week, its origins may be obscure. Still, historians appear to agree on one thing: it is uniquely Sri Lankan, originating here at some very distant point in the remote past before being adopted in many other parts of South Asia, and even further afield.  

Uniquely, it is also a wonder that can be constructed by almost anyone who knows how to boil rice. The recipe is simple. Once cooked, add coconut milk to the rice and cook for five more minutes, until no liquid remains. Then slice it into shapes – diamonds are a favourite - and leave it to cool and dry a little more. 

Kiribath, the dish's name, is the ultimate comfort food. And yet, like Dior’s little black dress, it is immensely versatile too. It can be served with anything: poached eggs, foie gras, curry, marmalade - but by far the best consumable accessory is Seeni Sambol, a sweet, tangy, caramelised onion flavoured with all the spices for which the island is so famous - tamarind, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, curry and pandan leaves, chilli and turmeric. 

Most, if not all, the food made on the island can be found elsewhere: in India, of course, but also the Maldives, Malaysia, the Arab world, Portugal, Holland, and Britain. These shared dishes have, over the centuries, evolved into distinctly Sri Lankan dishes, but only kiribath seems to have begun its world journey from this island. 

It is also the only food item to have inspired a stupa – the Kiribath Vehera in Anuradhapura, a small, barely standing and much overlooked stupa of almost unimaginable antiquity that once was said to house the sacred tooth relic itself, whose own origins, like the dish itself, are equally opaque. 

Yet Kiribath’s very existence signifies several fundamental things about Sri Lanka that reach far further than mere corporeal cravings. 

Like so many other Asian countries, rice is the country’s staple food, more so even than bread in the West. Sri Lanka devours over 2.4 million metric tons of it annually. 

A semi-aquatic plant, rice needs water to grow, around 2,500 litres of it for every kilo of harvested rice. Had ancient Sri Lanka rested on the calibre of those distant aquatic laurels that gave rise to Panda Wewa in the 4th century BCE, the country would have evolved little further than a few modest kingdoms. To grow the vast amounts of rice that were needed, then and now, considerable advances in water technology were required. 

And these are best epitomised by bisokotuwas – cutting-edge sluices, their design and position modified and perfected by the kingdom’s hydrogeological engineers, the Quantum Computing scientists of their day. 

Their revolutionary innovations were far ahead of anything else in the world. They ensured that water could be released from a reservoir without putting so much pressure on the dam embankment that it would collapse. But at scale – for this was the breakthrough. 

The new sluice designs greenlit the possible size of reservoirs, allowing them to scale up to unprecedented levels; water in unimaginably large quantities could be coll...

As a tree, it traces its lineage to the bodhi tree in Bihar, under which Lord Buddha sat sometime around 500 BCE before attaining his enlightenment, a nirvana of not inconsiderable benefits, including a complete understanding of the true nature of everything. Its illustrious history aside, the near relatives of bodhi trees are arguably more beautiful, including figs, banyans, breadfruits, jacks, and mulberries. 

But history is rarely written by the beautiful. It is the survivors who get to tell the story, and although there is no such thing as an average lifespan for a tree, the bodhi tree squats confidently at the end of the spectrum, living for up to 3,000 years. It can tell stories that would put Scheherazade herself to sleep.

The bodhi still growing in Anuradhapura dates back to 236 BCE. At the time of its arrival, the country was still taking tentative, if immutable, steps as an embryonic nation, and its appearance was to coincide with the reign of the island’s eighth recorded king, Devanampiya Tissa. 

It arrived just a few years after Buddhism itself arrived on the island, propagated by Mahindra, the son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka. Clearly, the young missionary had painted a compelling picture of his new island abode in his letters home, for his sister, Sanghamitta, soon joined him. She brought with her a golden vase in which grew a sapling of Lord Buddha’s original Bodhi Tree. 

Accompanied by nuns and an entourage of useful craftsmen, Sanghamitta landed in the north of the island and was met by King Devanampiya Tissa himself. With some ceremony, he escorted the party to Anuradhapura along a road said to have been softened with white sand (an enhancement that the present-day Road Development Agency might take note of), and the Bodhi sapling was planted in the city’s Mahameghavana Grove.

The world that this tiny tree then looked out upon was already more than a little magnificent. From its plot stretched a new and constantly enlarging city, the creation of Pandukabhaya, a staggering construction by any measure. As the ancient Athenians were putting the finishing touches to the Acropolis and the nascent Roman Republic issuing its first tentative laws, the palaces and structures commissioned by Sri Lanka’s first great king rose through the jungle, a tropical Versailles. 

Beyond its walls and moats stretched the Rajarata, the land ruled by the king, extending from the northern tip of the island to incorporate most of the island, with the likely exception of the impenetrable hill country and the far south – Ruhana.

The small bodhi tree’s very survival depended on all the components of a flourishing nation – a caringly and calibrated civil service, and phenomenally effective water management to feed the growing state. This, in turn, was enabled by international trade, culture, writing, and an evolving language – Sinhala; by roads, hospitals, horticulture, and an engineering capability that could assemble large stone palaces and temples. Surrounded by such professionalism, it is little wonder it flourished, and, in a sense, arrived just as the party began.

Many successive kings enriched the land on which it grew. Magnificent stone and later metallic statues were positioned around it, along with a fine canal and walls to protect it from wild elephants; a protective barrier, as recently as 1969, was mirrored by a golden fence. Now positioned on a high terrace, surrounded by four other terraces, its temple is one of the country’s most sacred sites, and from its vantage point it has borne witness to almost all of recorded island history: 2,300 years of it.

The tree itself is managed by priests, supported by a committee, and a panel of experts and agencies within the government’s environment ministry. It has given rise to innumerable other direct descendants, thirty-two of which are notable trees in their own right. 

Three of the most prominent grow in temples in Colombo, Nuwara Eliya and Monaragala. One was planted near Kandy in 1236 by a minister of King Parakramabahu II, and several others by early Kandyan kings around 1635. Another, in 1472 near Colombo, was planted by a somewhat overwrought King of Kotte, Bhuvanaikabahu VI.

Four in Trincomalee, planted in 1753, mark the moment Buddhism began to recover from the onslaught of colonisation. Two even have British associations. The future King Edward VII planted a bo tree in 1875 in Peradeniya Gardens during a state visit more associated with big game hunting and dancing girls; whilst in 1803, a British officer, Davy, hid in one to (briefly) escape a massacre in Kandy. 

The saddest, though, is one planted around 522 CE by a poet-loving king, soon to kill himself in grief for the murder of his friend, Kalidasa, a writer with a finer sense of poetry than he had for women.

And although the Sri Maha Bodhi is in many respects a tamed and urban tree, it is also, by virtue of being a plant, an iconic symbol of the island’s remarkable biodiversity. Its very existence infers the exceptional quantity of Sri Lanka’s endemic species; its wide array of climatic zones; and ecosystems that include vast forests that still cover almost a third of the entire land.

Almost 100 years later, a start was made on ancient Sri Lanka’s third great wonder – one that was to comprise Asia’s equivalent of the three great pyramids of Giza – the three great stupas of Anduraupura: the Ruwanweliseya, the Abhayagiri, and the Jetavanaramaya.

Stupas are a structure exclusive to Buddhist countries. The shape is made for perfect skylines. Bells, bubbles, pots, lotuses – even heaps of paddy: Sri Lanka’s many thousands of stupas were built in a range of related shapes, and in such numbers that it is unlikely that a five-minute car journey anywhere in the country will fail to take you past one. 

They are still being constructed to this day – in Kandy, Kalutara and Kotmale, to name just three.

Whatever their shape or age, they are outstanding architectural creations, mesmerisingly graceful as they rise over their visiting pilgrims, providing them with a place to meditate and a home for the relics and religious objects they venerate. And its three most important ones are found in the island’s heartland - Anuradhapura. 

The oldest of the trees is the Ruwanweliseya, built between 161 and 137 BCE by King Dutugamunu, and today stands at 103 meters. The first steps in its construction are told in extraordinary detail by the Mahavamsa Chronicle, which started “on the full moon day of the month of Vesak. King Dutugamunu had the workers dig a 7-cubit-deep excavation. 

He had soldiers bring in round stones and had them crushed with hammers. Crushed rocks were placed at the bottom of the excavation and compacted using elephants. The Elephants had their feet bound in leather to protect them. Fine clay was ...

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 that the island, with each new renaissance, was able to use 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 that has been 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 follow the medieval and early modern ages. 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 the skill of a card shark. 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 frescoes 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 far south of a million, which was the island’s population in 1800 CE.

 ...

After decades of Lambakarna kings, many eagerly pious, ruling with unremitting incompetence, Gotabhaya was nothing less than a shock.  

After all, he had been one of the very same three plotters who drove the kingdom into yet another civil war just years earlier, apparently as unaccountable to good governance as any of the many earlier Lambakarna kings who ruled as if they were celestially charged to gambol their through reigns like ancient Ves dancers, leaving lakes of regicidal blood in the wake of their inopportune administration.

It was as if some brooding, macho junior army officer had upended his own army, bending generals, kings and sleek courtiers to the austere new realities of a victorious coup, in the style of Jerry Rawlings or Gamal Abdel Nasser. Comparing notes with either of them would have given Gotabhaya all the validation he required.  Not that he was the sort to seek approval.

Competent dictators have their moment in the sun, too, and the time was more than ripe for the arrival of Gotabhaya. His very name is still used in the country to suggest authority, command, control.  

Army bases, naval ships, even an ex-president who strove with little success to aspire to his reputation – all bear the name of this stern Lambakarna king.   What he lacked in charm, charity, and religious tolerance, Gotabhaya made up for with the sort of firm government that took the fizz out of regicide.

And so, around 253 or 254 CE, Gotabhaya seized the throne and, for fourteen years, ruled Sri Lanka with the proverbial rod of iron. 

A deeply conservative religious man, he was unimpressed by the Vajrayana movement, a form of tantric Buddhism that was making a slim but noticeable appearance in his kingdom. 

The movement was closely aligned with Mahayana Buddhism and was seen by many as incompatible with the Theravada Buddhism practised on the island since the 3rd century BCE. The king did all he could to thwart it, even banishing sixty monks for such beliefs.

But what he kept out with one door slammed shut, he inadvertently let in with another, for he entrusted his sons’ education to an Indian monk named Sanghamitta, a closet follower of Vaitulya Buddhism. 

The Vaitulya doctrinal strand was even more radical than the Vajrayana doctrine that Gotabhaya was so busy trying to eradicate. Like a time bomb, the impact of this private religious education on his successor was timed to go off the moment this alarming and archaic old king died.

His death in 267 CE left the country deeply divided. Several ministers, blithely (and, as it turned out, suicidally) bold, refused to participate in his funeral rites.  

His son and heir, Jetta Tissa I, a chip off the monstrous old block, had dozens of them rounded up, staking their impaled heads in a mournful circle around the old king’s body, a pitiless and iconic pageant of power that has haunted the island through the centuries, its most recent appearance being during the brutal JVP uprising in 1971 and 1987 when anxious neighbours calling on nearby villages might find such similar circles of horror.

Even so, there is a time when a country needs tough love, or even just tough everything, and Gotabhaya’s son sought, with creditable success, to assiduously out-tough his terrifying old father.  This display of strong-armed governance under yet another king was probably what was most needed to help keep at bay the lurking regicidal and anarchic tendencies inherent in the dynasty. 

Jetta Tissa’s decade-long rule is unlikely to have been an easy ride for those around him. Indeed, states The Mahavamsa Chronicle, “he came by the surname: the Cruel”.  It then, with dismay, elaborates on the steps he took to shift patronage and resources from the orbit of Theravāda Buddhism to Vaitulya Buddhism.

From the perspective of the majority Theravada Buddhists, life managed to take a further turn for the worse when Mahasen, the king’s brother, took the throne in 277 CE, a succession notable for being natural. 

Like his brother, Mahasen had been educated by the radical monk Sanghamitta.

A twenty-seven-year reign lay ahead of the new king, who got off to a good start, commissioning what would include sixteen massive reservoirs (the largest covering an area of nearly twenty square kilometres) and two big irrigation canals. 

But this did little to defray the resentment his pro-Mahayana religious policies sparked, prompting a wave of further insurrections opposing his opposition to Theravada Buddhism.

Undeterred, Mahasen set about building what would become the country’s largest stupa, the Jethavanaramaya, which was, until the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the second-tallest building in the world. 

To help, he ordered the plundering of the Mahavihara, the greatest Theravada Buddhist monastery in the land. Monks who resisted his Mahayana policies were pressured by various means, including attempts at starvation. 

Soon enough, the trickle of angry, anguished and adamant monks fleeing to the safety of Ruhuna in the south became a flood. Ominously, they were also joined by Meghavann Abaya, the king’s chief minister, who had broodingly raised an army in their defence. 

With surprising wisdom, the king drew back from the confrontation, saving his throne, making peace with the disgruntled Theravada Buddhists, and so enabling himself to enjoy a natural death in 303 CE. 

Mahasen’s late compromise notwithstanding, it is notable that right across these 50 years of three uncompromisingly hardheaded kings, the vice-like hold with which they gripped their realm was rarely seriously imperilled.  Despite the unusually high amount of religious dissent they inspired, they commanded with apparent ease, shunting into the darkest of corners the unruly immoderations of family politics. 

But even a run of dictators-kings has its own sell-by date, and this one came to an end when Mahasen’s son, Siri Meghavanna, inherited the throne and opted to super-change the hints of religious appeasement and kinder governance that had marked the fraying ends of his father’s choleric reign.

Under him, vast sums of state revenue were set aside to repair any damage to Theravada Buddhism.  The old religion’s buildings were restored, its stupas and temples renovated and once more publicly cherished.

It is a truism universally acknowledged that good things rarely come to good people. Still, in the case of King Siri Meghavanna, the aphorism rings as hollow as an elephant’s trunk in the jungle - for it was during his therapeutic reign that the greatest of all relics was to fall into his hands.  “Just,” as the late great Tommy Cooper might have said, “like that.”

Few relics ever stand the real test of time.  Most end up marooned, outpaced by the culture they once represented or the geography or religion that created them: the Holy Right Hand of King Stephen of Hungary; the wailing wall of occupied Jerusalem, the sandal of Muhammad in Istanbul’s Pavilion of the Holy Mantle; John the ...

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, still less 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, 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 to much later, little happened - in the jungle that is. 

Elsewhere, America declared itself independent, and the Holy Roman Empire dissolved. Europe was beset by wars, the Napoleonic, the First, the Second, the Cold. 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 crippled 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, the buildings were lovely, and only needed some love.

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, parake...

The pair were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde, Tristan and Isolde, Tarzan, and Jane of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aeneas, with the queen immolating herself. Or Medea plunged into full-scale murder after a disastrous encounter with Jason and the Golden Fleece. 

Vijaya and Kuveni are the Sri Lankan lovers whose names are most unequally recalled on the island today.

Public roads, management consultants, radio celebrities, hospitals, even bags of branded cement: it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding king and paterfamilias, Prince Vijaya. Much harder, indeed impossible, is to find similarly smitten organisations or people who bear the name “Kuveni,” Prince Vijaya’s first wife.

Coming from a nation that proudly boasts the modern world’s first female head of state, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, in 1960, this seems a monumental omission. But delve a little further, and it becomes increasingly clear why Kuveni, the lost queen of the isle of rubies, is the queen the country is too alarmed by to acknowledge adequately.

For Kuveni was not simply a wife and weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, and queen - but also a demon, a metamorphoser, an outcast, an avenging fury, suicide, traitor, murderess, ghost, and mistress of deception. A descendant of the gods, she is also a goddess to the country’s still-living Aboriginal peoples. For anyone, still less a queen, that’s more than enough baggage to weigh down one’s reputation.

But the baggage need not weigh down your journey for the locations on the island where you are likely to draw close to her are few and scattered.  And if taking in important sites, monuments, and attractions at a rate of (say) half a dozen a day, or perhaps just one and a half a day, is an essential measure of how successful a holiday or tour goes, then it would be best to abandon the search for Kuvani immediately. 

For she is, thankfully, not made to measure for orthodox sightseeing.  The obvious eludes her.  Mercifully, she is no credible candidate for Instagram.  She is more like a Slender Loris or Serendib Scops Owl, rare, almost nocturnal, secretive, whose sightings are best made for the journey, not the destination. 

Yet, in following her wreathlike footsteps, which are still, from time to time, just about discernible in certain parts of the island, one puts together a travel schedule like no other; unique, eccentric, authentic.  It will take you into the secret heart of the country itself, past, present, and future, and allow the muscles of your personal imagination to demonstrate their value.

Much of what we know about Kuveni and her husband, Vijaya, comes from two of three incomparable, paternalistic and subjective ancient chronicles (Dipavaṃsa, Mahavamsa, and Culavamsa) written from the third century CE onwards.

 Laying a shadowy trail of events and people through what would otherwise be a historical vacuum, they riotously mix up man, God and magic with morality, history, and myth. 

Historians naturally debate their factual accuracy, in which the doings of men and kings take a poor second place to that of monks and Lord Buddha, but this misses the point. 

No country, after all, is simply the total of its facts. 

It is also – and much more importantly - fattened up, like old-style foie gras, on all that its people believe too. And that is why the sorrowful and violent tale of Prince Vijaya and his demon queen so shockingly illuminates an island that, as Romesh Gunesekera put it, “everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself form a kind of sinewy poetry.”

“In Sri Lanka,” notes another writer, Michael Ondaatje, “a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts;” and, in the tale of Vijaya and Kuveni, the polar opposite of what is believed is the more likely truth.  Vijaya, whose alter ego may well have most recently emerged on The Dick Van Dyke Show, was doubtless ever one to say “That ain't no lady. That's my wife.” For a monster though Kuveni seems to be, one hardly needs the helpful filter of modern feminism to realise that she was in fact an iconic victim of men, and most heartening of all, a victim who bit back with unrestrained fury.

Had a man behaved like her, it would have generated awe-stuck changing-room chatter, eager to understand, sympathise with, and even emulate. But not a woman. Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood, and go on challenging them to this day.

Keep this in mind as you set out to first encounter Viyaja, recreating a moment that happened well over two thousand five hundred years ago.  The path, though gossamer thin, still sustains a few sites, frail as a spider’s web.

The first of these is some 180 kilometres from Colombo.  A gentle curving cape juts out from a mountain range in the Wilpattu National Park and into the northern entrance to the Puttalam Lagoon. If you were a ship approaching it from the Laccadive Sea, you would slide towards it as if it were a lighthouse, pointing your tiny, tired vessel into the vast, safe, shallow waters of the lagoon. This is Kudiramalai, said to have been the original site of Tambapanni, the ancient kingdom and port founded by Prince Vijaya.

Given all that was to come, this unremarkable shore enjoys a myth of mocking irony. A warrior queen, Alli Rani, and her Amazonian army, were said to have lived here exploiting and exporting its pearls until a great flood buried her palace under the waves and turned the enclosed lake into a lagoon.

And this is what Prince Vijaya found, pulling his boats onto a beach of reddish-brown sand – “Tamba”, meaning Copper; or as it was soon and later known: Tambapanni. It was the perfect spot for a settlement, commanding access to an excellent natural harbour opening into the Gulf of Mannar and an almost inexhaustible supply of pearl oysters.

For centuries, it was a key strategic port for island arrivals, even later welcoming Annius Placamus, one of the Roman Emperor Claudius’ tax collectors. Pliny refers to the place, naming it as the “Hipporus” harbour with a related town on a nearby hill - presumably Kudiramalai Mountain, patrolled, and still patrolled by white-bellied sea eagles.

“Horse Mountain” is another name for Kudiramalai, and for centuries, amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, a massive horse-and-man statue stood on the cliffs. Made of brick, stone, and coral, it is estimated to have been at least 35 feet high, its front legs raised, its rider clinging to reins, bearing a lantern to guide ships into the port.  

Locals still point to some modest ruins, all that remains, they say, of the horse and rider. And continually, raked by high waves and surf, broken bricks, pottery, and building materials, wash up on the shore, the priceless debris perhaps of the island’s first kingdom.

This, then, is all that remains of Sri Lanka’s earliest recorded kingdom...

Fluttering with pride across a million or more flagpoles from banks to private houses, government buildings to temples, lions have also given their name to any number of other things - from Lion tea to Lion larger, from Mount Lavinia’s Lion Pub to Galagedera Royal Lion Hotel, from soaps, cars, jewellers, insurance sales forces and even pop groups down south in Henakaduwa. Statues of the beast also found their way into early temples, palaces, and monasteries -  unfloutable sentinels of the great buildings of the state. But quite how lions got here is a matter of simmering altercation amongst vexillologists. Some point the finger at Prince Vijaya, others at King Dutugemunu, and still others at King Nissan Kamalla. But whatever the truth of the matter, there is more to the lion than just flags or brand names. 

That lions should assume so central a role is a victory of sorts for Panthera Leo Sinhaleyus, a subspecies of the lion unique to Sri Lanka, which became extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as the island’s famous Stone Age Balangoda Man walked his own last steps. Its discovery only came to light in 1936, when the archaeologist P.E.P. Deraniyagala uncovered two fossilised teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of a forensic detective, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of exhumed teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying anything, but the other, a left molar, presented such a distinctive structure as to not just twin it with lions but also set it apart from all known lion species. The discovery was later validated by a further breakthrough in 1962, when a complete right-limb middle phalanx of the same species was found. From these fragile artefacts, a lost subspecies was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place from what it would become, an island of open grasslands – a habitat perfect for lions, and big ones at that. But over time, as the monsoon rain fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat became ever more restricted and at some point, the creature just died out. 

Today, the Sri Lankan lion’s paramount historical descendant sits at the feet of what islanders call the eighth wonder of the ancient world - Sigiriya Rock. This massive lump of granite - a hardened, much-reduced magma plug – is all that is left of an extinct volcano. Lost in forests, inhabited by hermit monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by King Kashyapa I (or his father) as the location of a new fortress capital in 477 CE.

Guarding the staircase to an ancient fortress, six hundred feet above, are the two immense animal paws, rediscovered during excavations in 1898, all that remains of a crouching sphinx-like lion that guarded the palace entrance. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place: “Sigiriya,” the Sinhala for “Lion’s Rock.” 

Gazing at it, the most irresistible connection is, of course, to the legendary Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II, recalled by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Sigiriya, like the palace of the King of Kings, is as much a ruin as the lion paws that yet defend it. Each mitten is a sorrowful remnant exemplifying the accepted and formidable face of authority and statehood. 

From King Pandu Kabhaya founding Anuradhapura around 437 BCE, thereby marking the tangible beginnings of the Sri Lankan island state, to the inheritance enjoyed by the first Moriyan king, Dhatusena, in 463 CE, 900 years of solid national building had been achieved. Over those many centuries, an entire kingdom and culture had been consolidated, and an ancient state had thrived. Under, first, the Vijayan, and then the Lankbranaka, dynasties, a one-state government came to dominate the entire island, its grand writ running through countless villages from north to south, east to west, by means of the intricate bureaucratic, legal, and administrative structures that ordered its religion, water resources, taxation, and trade. At every stage, this sophisticated ordering of society was reinforced by caste demarcations that arose at least as early as 543 BCE with the arrival of the founding father, Prince Vijaya. With him came a variety of castes, most notably the Govigama – the landowners. A complex and hereditary feudal system soon developed from this, its voluminous obligations derived from work ordered by the king – the Rajakariya - for an astonishingly comprehensive set of occupations from toddy tapping to coconut growing, hair cutting to fishing. The state's managed bureaucracy had hierarchies so finely tuned that they even trickled down to village officials tasked with managing sluice gates and tanks. The arrival of Buddhism in the 3rd century BCE fortified and compounded these meticulous arrangements.

That the state was strong – able to endure even the suicidal excesses of some of its kings, to shrug off occasional invasions, civil wars, and droughts – was in large part due to the enduring capabilities of the social order that underwrote the kingdom. This institutionalised aptitude allowed the nation to function when even, at times, the government itself did not. Even - all too often -  when the island’s very social order was manifestly unfair and destructive, it remained a firm and formative force. 

“Sure,” cried John Steinbeck’s tenant farmer, “but it’s our land…We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours.”  

Sri Lanka’s lion - most memorably exemplified by that built by the early Moriyan kings at Sigiriya - is an apt symbol of this decisive national trait, one so critical that it helps explain another key reason for what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan: not just Buddhism, nor its early radical water technology, or even its singular island status – but its ability to, as Winston Churchill put it, “keep buggering on.”  For the lion, grand and majestic though it is, is first and foremost resistant. Nothing defeats it.

Never before the Moriyan kings had taken the throne had buggering on been such an imperative national trait. As the twenty-five monarchs of this third dynasty vacillated through their (usually brief) reigns, the state’s rulers became increasingly dependent on mercenaries to maintain control. The dynasty’s third king, Moggallana, made this something of a sine qua non when he overthrew his half-brother, King Kashyapa, with the help of mercenaries. He was not the first Anduraupuran king to do this: Ilanaga in 33 CE and Abhayanaga in 231 CE had done much the same. But in the Moriyan rule, mercenaries beca...

And though history pretends that everything about it is big – its rulers, events, structures, trends – it is actually not much more than the total of what are ultimately utterly personal stories and events that have been remembered; and in some small way, passed on so they are not wholly forgotten.

But even here, what survives is so eroded that history comes down to us as bare lists of rulers, or marks on coins, in the linguistic geography of a place or name, in written records that accidentally reference the families who operate slice gates or wash the clothes of priests.

Why people did what they did, how they felt, still less who they were: much of this can only ever be guessed at – even though this is where the most magnetic and momentous part of any story really resides.  

So, in trying to fathom the long-lost depths of Sri Lanka’s second royal dynasty – the Lambakannas - the few surviving scraps of hard evidence need to be combined with a spoonful of human empathy and conjecture if their tale is ever to make sense.  

Their adroit use of water technology to superpower their kingdom merely shows they were as bright and well-organised as the best kings of the previous Vijayan dynasty.

Oddly enough, to understand more, it helps to see things from the perspective of the world back in 1929, not 67 CE when the first Lambakanna king came to power.

Back in 1929, two things of great interest occurred.  The first was the collapse of Wall Street in faraway America.  Its corrosive and ultimately violent social and economic shockwaves radiated across the entire world, and nothing and no one was left feeling safe, protected or secure.  

The second event played out in Trincomalee, where archaeologists unearthed the remains of a once-lofty temple, built a stone’s throw from the Indian Ocean, sometime after 307 CE.  

Beneath earth, trees, and jungle, stretching out to the shores of a great lake, the Velgam Vehera’s many scattered ruins were brought back to sight for the first time in centuries: brick stupas, stone inscriptions, balustrades, buildings, moon stones – and mura gals.

These mura gals – or guard stones – are especially moving, standing in silent upright pose, guardians of the flights of steps that had led a multitude of forgotten people out of the everyday and into the sacred temple itself. 

The steps they protect have worn down to just a few flights, the moonstone they encompass is almost entirely rubbed away; the temple beyond is now just an outline of ancient bricks, and the guard stones themselves are plain, almost stumpy, but still doing their ageless job as sentinels of the site.

Similar guard stones stand in many other parts of the island, easy to see if you know what you are looking for, silent guardians of the state within. For to be a guardian is no little thing.

Guardian is an emotive word in Sri Lanka. It can be found incorporated by health and education providers, insurance companies, the army, the priesthood, the home guard, the air force, a news website, a hotel and even a wedding business. But long ago, it also had the meaning of the Lambakarnas, the dynasty that succeeded the founding Vijayan dynasty.

The Lambakarnas were guardians of the state. And it is in decoding and deconstructing their very name that you can best understand the relevance and purpose of this new royal dynasty and see it in its own terms - from afar: in time and place.

Possibly originating in India, the Lambakarnas likely claimed descent from Sumitta, a prince who formed part of the escort that brought the Bodhi tree from India in 250 CE. From this botanical pilgrimage, they would go on to become one of the island’s great barons, alongside other such families as Moriyan, Taracchas and Balibhojak.

Their power derived from their position as hereditary guardians or secretaries to the king. They took a prominent part in religious ceremonies. But there was more to them than merely carrying coronation parasols and flags. They were connected to the military, to weapon manufacture and, as writers, must have been involved in much of the critical administration of the kingdom. 

Generation after generation of Lambakarnas were raised with the unshakable belief that their family had a purpose that went far beyond the confines of kinship.  They were bound by duty, custom and history to protect the very state itself.

But they found, eventually, that to do this, they had to become the state itself – to rid it of its useless kings and take things over

They managed the transition from one of several aristocratic families to the ruling family with what, at first, appeared to be consummate ease. 

After the ruinous excesses of the last Vijayan kings, this new replacement dynasty seemed to grip the one fundamental axiom of kingship: govern well, live long. They were to rule all or much of the island (depending on the period) over two distinct periods. The first of these lasted 369 years, spanning the reigns of 26 monarchs from 67 CE to 436 CE.

Their rule was both spectacularly successful – and utterly disastrous.

Under them, new stupas, monasteries, reservoirs, canals, temples, and dwellings filled out the land. The mores of society progressed. Agriculture flourished, and technical advances, from construction to medicine, bestowed benefits on the kingdom.  In particular, the advances they made in water technology to build larger reservoirs dramatically enabled the state to increase agricultural production exponentially and, through that, raise state revenues to support increased urbanisation and further infrastructure capital development.

But as Gladstone’s friend, Lord Acton remarked: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And absolute power indeed corrupted the Lankbranaka.  Carried along on a gathering tide of hubris and indolent self-confidence, they morphed from being guardian kings to sun kings who flew, like Icarus himself, so close to the sun that their wings were burned up – and they fell to earth, victims, who had unwisely taken to believing their own press releases.

As the raw hunger for power replaced their desire actually to govern, just under half the Lambakarna monarchs were to die at the hands of their successors, victims to a predilection for assassination that ran like a malign monomeric thread through their DNA.

The first time they faced ruin, they managed to draw back from the regicide and power implosions that rocked them, regaining their savoir faire. 

But the second outbreak propelled them inexorably to their destruction, leaving the state weak, distracted, and unable to fend off an invasion of the island from the Pandyan dynasty of South India, the fourth such invasion for Tamil India that Sri Lanka suffered.

And yet it had all started so well as they first set about to rescue their cripped country from the excesses of the last Vijayan kings.

Overca...

Within minutes of the monsoon deluge starting, the lawns become shallow green lakes, their surface calm obliterated every millisecond by fat cool rain drops falling like a bedtime story from heavy skies.

Cool damp breezes stir and waft across the frangipani garden and into my office where Bertie is asleep on a chair pulled up by the window, his father, mother, and sister asleep on the terrazzo below. Several cross monkeys have taken shelter just within view under the thick leaves of the mango tree.

The best thing about this rain is that it is Now Rain. It’s so delicious and overwhelming as to rub out the past and negate the future. It does the work of a thousand therapists, and focuses the mind simply on The Now.

Two inspiringly meditative guests from Singapore are lapping up the lush dramas from a back veranda. Two others have set off intrepidly in a tuk tuk for Ella. 

All sound gives way before the downpour. It fills the estate like the sort of unending “Um” you might breath out after a particularly reviving yoga session.

The shower plucks flame tree blossom, scattering the red glitter across the gardens. I can hear our goats bleating with satisfaction within the dry walls of their new Goat Palace that we have just constructed beneath the main estate road.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”  

Buddhism and Rain are very complimentary.

The first and most common of these creatures is the porcupine, known to the consternation of proto nationalists as the Indian Crested Porcupine. It is found right across Sri Lanka and India. 

Nikita Khrushchev, the bombastic Russian leader, was unexpectedly wise to the beast, stating to his enemies that “if you start throwing hedgehogs at me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you.“ Up to three feet long and sixteen kilos in weight, they are, like Khrushchev, highly territorial. 

When they feel threatened or their territory is unacceptably encroached upon, their sharp quills will spring up, and they will go on the attack. Nocturnal, and usually hidden in the burrows that are their homes, they are eager consumers of bark, fruit, berries, vegetables and almost all plants in gardens and plantations. Gratifyingly monogamous, their pregnancies last eight months, and the two to four cubs born live with the parents until they are two or three years old. 

Fossilised records from thousands of years ago show that the present porcupine once had an ancestor similar, though smaller, to its current form: Hystrix Sivalensis Sinhaleyus. No linguist has yet come forward to show whether or not this antique version of today’s porcupine would have been able to talk to its modern heir. But it is more than likely, not least because the language of porcupines is far removed from the vagaries that force most human languages to bend, evolve, or corrupt. 

Even when alone, porcupines are astonishingly chatty and keep themselves entertained with a wide range of grunts, whines, moans, snorts, and murmurs. Interporcupine communication occurs more naturally during the mating season, a time joyfully characterised by shattering shrieks and screams. Wailing and a clattering of teeth is a racket saved for predators.  For one-on-one inter porcupine fights – more common when two males are in ardent courtship of a single female, they will add to their usual litany of noises a deafening set of howls and screams. 

Pangolins, however, the second of the island’s mammal species, or scaly anteaters as they are also called, have an almost wholly different array of sounds that they use to get through their day. Of the many blessings given to them by the good lord, sight, sadly, was not one of them. Their tiny eyes are covered by the thickest of eyelids - a sort of anti-termite defence – and their vision is poor to myopic. It seems that as the animal became ever more nocturnal, its eyesight decreased accordingly, proving once again that evolution, unlike one’s bank account, can always keep up with events. 

It is sound and smell, therefore, that give the beast all the guiding lights it needs to flourish. Their hearing is acute, and their noses, bristling with the most powerful of scent sensors, sit at the end of exceptionally long snouts. They can find their way into ant or termite nests, however far underground, eyes closed. Given that their sticky tongues can stretch for almost 28 inches, the blighted insects have little option but to surrender themselves gracefully as supper – some 70 million a year per pangolin, on the count of one exhausted scientist.

On the auditory front, the pangolin repertoire of sound is all hisses, whimpers, snuffles, and sniffs – a breathier orchestration when compared to porcupines. If disturbed, they hiss and chuff in deep breaths. Snorting is often used in place of hello to a fellow pangolin, and happy, contented grunts accompany their dining.

Pangopups whimper to communicate with their mothers. However, no one has yet deciphered the sheer variety of whimpers recorded to determine which whimper is slated for which kind of inter-family statement.  Pregnancies last around two months, and the pangopup (for there is usually only one) gets carried on its mother’s tail until it can move around confidently. 

Pangolins reserve their most arresting sound for when they are most really alarmed. Curling into a ball, they rub their hard scales together to create a unique jungle maraca sound. This is often accompanied by the ejection of an exceptionally noxious, acid-smelling liquid distilled in glands near their anus. It is hard to clean off, the obvious lesson being, never shock a pangolin, especially before a date.

But of course, the most immediately exciting thing about spotting a pangolin is not their smell or sound – but their looks. Clothed in dexterous overlapping and generously rounded scales, they are a unique cross between an architectural marvel, a desert tank, and a Viking warrior clad in chain mail. 

Measuring some fixed feet nose to tail, pangolins make their home in burrows in rainforest and grassland and even modest hill country - right across the Indian subcontinent and all across Sri Lanka. Even so, they may soon drop off the Manifest Mammals list as they have become increasingly threatened, not only by habitat loss affecting almost all animals on the island but also by illegal poaching. Its meat is seen as a luxurious bush meat to jazz up the jaded appetites of decadent diners. And its scales are prized in Chinese and traditional medicines for all manner of disorders for which there is not a single shred of supporting or validating evidence. Their skins are routinely butchered into rings, charms or crafted into grisly leather goods, like boots and shoes that shame their wearers more than they might be if caught dancing naked down Galle Face Green on the top of a big red bus.

Such predatory and pointless threats are more understandably avoided by the third of the island’s manifest mammals – the jackal, with whom the word cherish has yet to find much of a home. “It is far better,” wrote Tipu Sultan, shortly before being killed by the future Duke of Wellington in Srirangapatna in 1799, “to live like a lion for a day than to live like a jackal for a hundred years”. 

The Sultan, who of course, saw himself as the lion, was merely channelling the unrelentingly poor press that jackals have endured since recorded time - in Arabic holy writ, the Bible; even in Buddhist Pali literature, which depicts them as inferior, greedy, cunning creatures. 

Despite accruing the sort of headlines beloved of the Daily Mail, the Sri Lankan Jackal is second only to the Leopard in the pecking order of island predators. And Sri Lankan it is, to its very paws, for the Sri Lankan jackal differences from its Indian cousin, the Soutth Indian Golden Jackal, by virtue of its marginally greater size, the rooted lobe on the inner side of the third upper premolar (a peculiarity to capture the attention of the more discerning spotters) and a darker less shaggy coat all round.

It is a skilled hunter, and, like a wolf, a pack animal that will eat anything from rodents, birds, and mice to young gazelles, reptiles, and even fruit. It is also an admirable scavenger, good at tidying up any suppurating bit of animate mess that needs attention. Although f...

There is the salary, of course, sometimes, but not always, cut up into digestible, discussable sections, each adorned with dependencies like earnings longing to glitter. Each a niggling dialog.

Then there is the bonus: this is always deliciously Byzantium and requires fortitude and a sure command of a longish dictionary to fully negotiate. 

Then there are the allowances: a car perhaps, or travel; schooling maybe for those many children that may now ripen like fruits on the branch of a well-sustained tree? Clothing? 

The cigar allowance has sadly become a thing of the past; and even the allowances for recreational drugs in the music industry appear to have been phased out. But never mind, there’s the golden hallo; the parachute (also golden); the softer accessories: office, equipment, aromatherapy diffuser. Then the Gordian knot of working hours and the working-from-home options. On and on it goes, a menu that challenges even that put up in Paris by La Tour d’Argent.

But never once do they mention barbers. 

Dilrek, the barber, is most certainly one of my main elements in the compensation package that comes by virtue of running an estate and hotel in the middle of the jungle in central Sri Lankan.

Like all barbers, Dilrek is always changing his own hair style. 

His hair is thick and black, endowed with a vigour that ensures it grows at the speed of Formula 1 cars at Silverstone. Sometimes, the sides are shaved to a brutal Number 1, leaving the middle section standing proud as a soufflé above his forehead. Sometimes it is all cut, soldier style; or trimmed neatly everywhere like the well-meaning coiffure of a young accountant. 

Occasionally, Dilruk turns his full attention to the sideboards, fashioning them with a careful attention to detail so that they curl out in luxuriant twists like tiny croissants. Rarely – but most grandly – the beard and moustache are brought into the mix, often cut to the opposite style of the head hair – so presenting you with a magnetic Before and After image. 

Dilruk is a mere WhatsApp away; and arrives, gear in hand right down to the hair sheet at precisely 8am. 
He sets his barbering chair up under the shade of a frangipani tree. 

Today, yellow and orange oriels flit from branch to branch. On his last visit it was a baby giant squirrel. 

Before me stretch long dewy lawns, acid green topiary hedges (than even now Janaka is trimming), and brick paths lined with gothic mothers-in-law tongue. Four schnauzers chase suicidal squirrels before coming to rest under my chair. I have tried to persuade Dilruk to lend them a simultaneous fur cut; given what feats of fashion he lavishes on his own beard, I don’t doubt he would make something splendid out of schnauzer beards and moustaches. But dogs it seems, even schnauzers, appear to be firmly outside his bailiwick. 

The radio is playing a discussion led by little Melvyn Bragg about the Sun King, Louis XIV, which seems apposite given the grand hairstyles adopted in Versailles by his courtiers, though the guests, all academics in early modern history, have little to say about either Marie Antoinette’s Pouf or the exuberant wigs worn by the men around her.

Dilruk’s style is very mellow. Softly does he wield his long, sharp scissors; they move like elven whispers around your head. Although built with the sturdy compact efficiency of a Challenger 2, Dilruk is so light on his toes that you never know where the next cut will land. 

He gives off no smell or sound as he steadily moves around my head, so different to the boisterous Italian barbers on Fulham Road who rattle through the colourful highlights of their day and life like Hallo Magazine. Instead of coming out of the encounter like a chocolate sundae sprinkled with too many hundreds and thousands, Dilruk leads you out of it as if you had both been on the same meditation. 

And what compensation package, you have to ask yourself, can ever compete with that.

Sudeth and Kasun, our (pre) existing chefs, have stepped effortlessly into the gap created by the departure of a big enchilada and the pot is set again to simmer smoothly. Two Commis chefs have joined the team and the kitchen whirls once more with contented, timely creatively – rather than the sultry Gordon Ramsay B Side that is the alternative chorus of any kitchen.

Both Sudeth and Kasun are pleasingly talented and able; well organized, properly mindful of standards, hardworking and curious to prod the boundaries of our Menu Mantras.

Our kitchen is (I know I may be unjustly accused of bias here), the best within at least a 65 mile range, if not more. It’s certainly way better than anything in Kandy, Negombo, Matale, Gampaha, Kurunegala, Hatton, Dambulla, or most of the grand restaurants and hotels in Colombo. That’s more than conscionably good for a kitchen in the jungles of central Sri Lanka where finding pomegranate molasses can take the better part of a week.

Having eaten my way through more Michelin stared restaurant menus than any generous god could countenance, I‘ve rediscovered the blindingly obvious: you can’t beat simplicity, authenticity, routine. Do a few things really well; keep to what you can buy that is really fresh and local; and take to heart that food is a tour (or at worst, an excursion) through a country, a district, a culture. That’s it. That’s our menu Mantra. Entirely. No more. And definitely no less.

This means leaving other kitchens in other lands to fashion dry ice trompe l'oeil salads, pompadour cuts of preternaturally expensive meats from distant Japanese prefectures, mercurial seascapes daubed with caviar and served on mirrors dusted with blushing Anatolian salts; and all the other melodramatic dishes prepared for the jaded urban palates of this starving earth.

No. 

No., No. No.

Food may be fuel; but it sure isn’t entertainment, brief and flimsy as anything you might catch flickering across the Netflicks screens before it is gone forever. Not unless you’ve run out of other things to do in a long and reckless life; and have taken to climbing the Munros or dropping in on the College of Hearlds to research your matriarchal family line. Food is culture; learning; life. 

What I revere about our estate food is that all our ingredients are really really local (though the curd most certainly comes from heaven). The most perfect vegetables and fruit are sensually abundant just a stone’s throw or so away; most of the usual – but still more of the unexpected. The spices we pick from our gardens: cinnamon, cloves, pandom leaves, pepper. cardamom, vanilla, curry leaves, turmeric, goraka, curry leaves, ginger, cumin, chilli, . The herbs we grow ourselves. 

With meats, we are very picky. Good beef doesn’t happen on the island: it comes from thousands of miles away, tired, jet-lagged and an affront to any armchair environmentalist. Pork is challenging; locally sourced, easily disgraced. Lamb, like penguins, have yet to call this tropical island home. 

But the chicken is excellent. And the fish, of course, better still. Sailfish swims off all the coasts, its flesh thick, steaky and white with none of the oily after taste of some sea creatures. And tuna – well, enough said. Tasty tuna can be seen off every beach doing backstroke, breaststroke, crawl, a gleaming Sri Lankan passport clasped between its teeth. Tuna is very very good.

And then of course there is rice. 

Back west or down the sleek corridors of the G7 nations its mostly white. Intermittently wild,. Sometimes brown. Occasionally organic. 

But here there is also Suwendel, Kuruluthuda Wee, Madathawalu, Sulai, Murungakayan, Pachaperumal, Sudu Heenati, Kaluheenati, Gonabaru, Kuru Hondarawala, Polon Wee, Guru Podi Wee, Kuru Ma Wee, Pulli Wee, Alagu Samba, Guru Wee, Pushpa Raga, Alagu Samba, Allei Perumal, Hapumal Wee, Mada El, Rasna Vaalu, Askarayal, Hata Da Wee, Rata Thawalu, Hathi El, Madei Karuppan, Rath El, Heen Deveradhari, Maha Maa Wee, Bala Goda Wee, Manikkam, Masuran, Bala Murunga, Heen Rath El, Rath Karael, Bala Samba, Heen Samba, Molagu Samba, Rath Mada Al, Bala Thatu Wee, Heen Suvuru Wee, Molligoda, Bata Kiri El, Hondarawalu, Motakarupan, Mudu Kiri El, Rathu Bala Wee, Beheth Heenati, Kahata El, Murunga, Rathu Sooduru, Kahata Samba, Niyan Wee, Kalu Bala Maa Wee, Kalu Bala Vee, Deveradhari, Kalu Handiran, Sudu Maa Wee, Goda Wee, Kottayar, and Wanni Dahanala.  To name but a few.

As Van Goff might have said to a curious passer by: we am not short of colours. To shape food with all this around us is little short of joyful.

The are the obvious things you should never deviate from, like toast soldiers with boiled eggs; nutmeg with comfort macaroni cheese, proper homemade marmalade, and freshly baked bread. 

But the katsup with our lunchtime fish and chips isn’t Heinz -its homemade, with nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon.

Curries come with Mango & Rosemary Chutney.

Ice creams are flavoured with more than vanilla or chocolate – with cardamom or ginger; chilli & kitel or pepper & honey. Sri Lanka’s melting pot history of Indian, Portuguese, Dutch or British flavours tosses such loved invaders as hoppers, milk rice, love cakes, bibikkan, samosas, gulam jamun, bhajis, and lassis onto our menu. Soups made from carrot, cauliflower, beetroot, or pumpkin stir with the greater intensity of added ginger, cardamon, coconut or chilli. Island favourites like naran kawum, curries of cashew nut or vegetable, dishes of dhal, meats or classic dishes of tuna, cauliflower, spinach, salsas, potatoes, or beans are enlivened by a touch of lemongrass, rosemary & kitel, pineapple, saffron, tamarind or ginger, kittul & basil.

You just can’t not meet a bit of the real Sri Lanka when you eat from Kasun and Sudeth’s kitchen, despite choosing your food with the judgement of dowager. Even their breakfast fried eggs have little smiles on the yokes picked out in pepper grapes.  Real food, as Julia Child observed, is a serious art form and a national sport.

On one side of the scales, you might imagine the enticing black and red gold of the island’s indigenous pepper and cinnamon. These were the spices that drew in European colonists, enabling them to make untold profits and to establish their sprawling foreign empires more effectively. And on the other side of the scales are those spices – such as chilli, nutmeg, and vanilla - that the Europeans introduced to the island. 

It is, of course, an invidious comparison. Imperial apologists would want to throw in all sorts of other things from railways to constitutions, tea to telephones. Nationalists would meet each opening with equal or better examples to prove the opposite. It is a bill that remains in pyretic calculation. But for foodies and spice enthusiasts, what remains, even before the cost is reckoned, is the exuberant existence of the spices themselves, however they arrived. 

Remarkably, though, it was Arab traders, not European colonists, who made the most significant impact on the island’s spice heritage – if measured in terms of variety, range, and application. For it was through them that the final nine or so other spices so critical to the country’s character first arrived: cloves, cardamom, coriander, cumin, fenugreek, pandam leaves, fennel, tamarind, and ginger. For these traders, working the ports of the Indian Ocean from Africa to Indonesia, they filled what was empty and emptied what was filled. 

“Run, run as fast as you can! You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!”  And nor can you, for there is nothing to touch the taste of ginger. Known in more formal circles as Zingiber Officinale, it is a cultigen - one of those rare species that has been so altered by mankind as to no longer exist in its original wild state. 

Originating from the rainforest islands of Southeast Asia, it has been modified to fit human culinary and medicinal needs. It probably arrived in Sri Lanka with Arab traders, but its travel schedule is so ancient as to be all but lost. The Rig Veda, which dates to around 1400 BCE and is the world’s oldest Vedic text, mentions ginger, and later ayurvedic books elaborate on its medicinal qualities - to reduce indigestion and nausea, stimulate the respiratory and nervous system, and, by improving blood circulation, act as an aphrodisiac. Recent scientific studies that have tabulated sexual function, fertility, and testosterone levels suggest that there may be something in this. Western science has also set in train a wave of further forensic research into the clinical applications of ginger in cancer control, menstrual pain, glucose levels, and the treatment of arthritis.

It is an easy plant to grow, demanding dappled shade, well-drained soil, and high humidity. Rhizomes with green growth buds are planted in shallow depressions, and before long, green leaves, sometimes up to ten feet high, spread out, accompanied by pink or white flowers so perfect in their construction as to look as if they have sprung from moulds. Within eight months, the roots can be harvested and the process restarted. 

Our own ginger, grown with a carefully defensive mindset to ward off attacks by rampaging wild boar, lives in stone beds in the Spice Garden. At $10 billion and growing, the global market for ginger outstrips production, so prices are higher than they need to be. The culinary form of ginger has two main variants: white ginger, available in large or small sizes, with the smaller variant preferred for cooking; and red ginger, preferred for medicinal use. All these variants have sub-variants with scores. The pale yellow flesh of Chinese ginger, for example, is chosen for pickles; Rangoon Ginger for oils and perfumes; and Indian ginger, like the tiny amount of ginger grown in Sri Lanka, is most favoured in cooking and drinks for its much stronger taste. Its sweet, citrusy flavour, as well as its peppery heat, changes during preparation. When raw, it is at its most pungent; when dried, it is at its hottest; and when cooked, it is at its sweetest. 

From ginger cakes and ginger beer to stir-fry ginger beef, it is used in many dishes across the world, but perhaps none so celebrated as with Gingerbread men. England’s first Queen Elizabeth even had an official royal gingerbread maker whose sole role was to make such pastries, once famously creating edible clones of all the foreign dignitaries who assembled at her 16th-century court. In Sri Lanka, it is especially favoured in chicken and sambal dishes.

Older even than Harry Potter’s Dumbledore, Tamarind, native to Africa, has been growing in India and, probably, Sri Lanka since at least 1300 BCE, roughly the same time as the civilisations of the late Bronze Age around the Mediterranean collapsed. It has godly properties, being included in the Book of Enoch, one of those texts that was banned from inclusion in the Bible; and in the Hindu Epic, the Ramayana, a text that Hindus believe dates back 1.2 million years, though scholars argue for a later date - around 5,000 BCE. Indeed, it was old enough to be included in some of the earliest Indian Ayurvedic texts – the Charaka Samhita, the Sushruta Samhita, and the Nighantus. Its very name appears to hint at its travel history: "tamarind" is derived from the Arabic phrase “tamar hindi,” which means "Indian date." Commonly added to ayurvedic medicines to treat constipation, digestive disorders, arthritis, blood disorders, wounds, and cell health, it is now undergoing deeper scientific studies for its pharmacological properties, helping with asthma, liver problems, diabetes, and dysentery.

Tamarind’s primary compound, tartaric acid, is what gives it its sour flavour – this characteristic being the reason it is so liked in Thai and Indian dishes for the gentle and complex layer of acidity it adds to curries, soups, stews, chutneys, sauces, as well as in desserts, and drinks. It pops up in Massaman, Rassam, and Pad Tha; in tamarind jam in Costa Rica; in tamarind beer in the Bahamas; and, since 1876, in England’s legendary Lea & Perrins’ Worcestershire sauce. In Sri Lanka, it is most widely used in curries made with fish, chicken, and pork. It grows as a long-lived evergreen tree, reaching heights of 80 feet in good sun and well able to withstand droughts. Lightly covered with pinnate leaves, its modest red and yellow flowers develop into hard, six-inch knobbly pods, the flesh within them being the best part of the tree to use. 

Its cousin, in bitterness at least, is fenugreek, a plant which, though originating in Turkey six thousand years ago, became so widespread as to appear with residential ease in the texts, medicines and recipes of the first Mesopotamian and Indian civilisations, as well as those of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Use it, advised the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE, to embalm the dead, purify the air, and cleanse the tummy. A central component of Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, it was regarded with great suspicion by Western medicine – until recently. It is now enjoying an investigative renaissance as labourites around the world probe its antidiabetic, anti-obesity, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antifungal, and antibacterial properties. The plant, an annual, grows...

The greatest of these is cinnamon. Its perfumed bushes mark out the outer edge of the spice garden at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. No other thing, except perhaps Buddhism itself, water, or Sri Lanka’s island status, has had such a marked impact on the country as this miraculous spice, beloved of Herodotus, Aristotle, Nero, and such famous chefs as Vivek Singh and Emma Bengtsson. It is the magnetic North of the world’s spices, having enticed traders, colonists and planters to Sri Lanka, the invisible force field of its glittering commercial allure sucking them in, willing monopolist marketers, villainous vendors, wolfish merchants. The consequences of their commercial obsession were to remake the island - utterly.

But that is, of course, not the fault of the plant itself, and not even the fact that it has been expropriated in name by hotels and insurance companies, wellness spas, buns, babies, and kitchenware can detract from its epic health and culinary properties. Unlike Cinnamon aromaticum or Cinnamon cassia, which come mainly from Vietnam and Indonesia and are commonly known as Chinese cinnamon, Ceylon Cinnamon – or, to give it its Latin name, Cinnamomum verum - comes almost exclusively from Sri Lanka. It is, in fact, just one of ten species that can credibly claim to be fully indigenous to the island – the other fourteen key ones being imports of one kind or another. 

The most significant difference between the two variants of cinnamon lies in their health qualities. Of the eighty or so chemical compounds that make up both varieties of cinnamon, there is little to compare in how well they are known to improve insulin, increase blood sugar uptake, reduce cholesterol, and, with their shared anti-inflammatory and antioxidant qualities, act against bacteria and fungi - even to the extent of stopping the growth of tumours. Both also help prevent the buildup of tau, a substance in the brain that can lead to Alzheimer’s disease. The way they metabolise into sodium benzoate mitigates the loss of proteins like Parkin and DJ-1, thereby inhibiting the progression of Parkinson’s Disease. The polyphenols in both varieties help detoxify enzymes, protecting against the growth of cancer cells. Their shared cinnamaldehyde component activates thermogenesis, a process that increases calorie burning. 

But where they differ is in their inclusion of coumarin, an aromatic organic compound with known hepatotoxic and carcinogenic properties, and one that is known to cause liver damage. Compared to Chinese cinnamon, Sri Lankan cinnamon has exceptionally low levels of this dangerous chemical - 250 times less, to be exact. It is therefore the only sure variety to use for health benefits.

Gourmands would also argue for its preference in cooking. Sri Lankan cinnamon has a flavour that is arresting, in its difference – sweeter, more subtle, and less bitter than Cinnamon cassia. It has a softer texture and a lighter colour – and, commanding a much higher price than Chinese cinnamon, accounts for just 9% of the world’s $1 billion market. As one food writer put it: “Cinnamon is the flavour equivalent of being hugged by your grandmother.”

From fruit pies and custards, sweet breads and rolls, teas, soup, lattes, pilaf, baked meats, pancakes, cakes, dumplings and pot roasts, its delicate nature allows it to complement dishes rather than dominate them, war-lord style. Imagine some of the world’s great dishes like Kanelbullar, beef rendang, lamb tagine, apple crumble, Franzbrotchen Buns, or Teurgoule rice pudding – but without cinnamon to transform them. Across Sri Lanka, the spice has found its way into dozens of classic island dishes, including Watalappan, a spiced coconut and jaggery custard; Bibikkan; Dutch Lamprais; Kavum, sweet rice-flour treacle fritters; and scores of common curries. Here at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, our chefs have used it to create a morish breakfast bun – the Kanelbullar Crocodile Croissant – a pastry made like the classic Sri Lankan sugar crocodile bun, shaped like a croissant and flavoured like a Swedish cinnamon Kanelbullar.

The growing spice likes it hot but not blistering – a steady temperature of around 25˚C to 32˚C. Although the soils best suited to it are reckoned to be the sandy white soils of Negombo, its demand for plenty of moisture makes it a firm fixture in the central hilly area of the country. 

It is grown most easily from seeds, 3-4 per pot, and planted out about 4 feet apart in these clusters, whose competing roots ensure a beautifully shrubby plant, best able to give off many branches to peel, and so limit the dangers of any one plant racing to become a fifteen metre tall tree.

Pruning starts at about 18 months, with cross branches removed and the plants kept to a height of around 3 metres. Twice-yearly harvesting occurs after about three years, at which point the branches are cut, the leaves removed, and the outer layer of bark scraped off with a Surana Kurutta knife. The raw stems are rubbed with brass rods to squeeze out the oils, and then, with the aid of a special curved knife – a Koketta – the softer inner bark is peeled to a target width, with different widths determining the final grade of the spice. 

Thirteen different grades are recognised, mainly determined by the diameter of the quill. The highest, known as Alba, has quills that are less than 6mm in diameter. More typically, C4 is around 13-15mm in diameter, and C3 is between 15 and 17mm in diameter. All three are known as “Heen Kurundu” or Smooth Cinnamon. “‘Gorosu Kurundu'” includes quills that are up to 38 mm in diameter - typically used for grinding into cinnamon powder. The cinnamon sheaths are then dried in the shade, curling inwards; the quills are then placed on strings or racks to dry still further.

Among the world’s key spices, Sri Lankan cinnamon holds its own, costing up to $60 a kilo – more than cloves, though less than saffron ($500 to $5,000 per pound), vanilla ($200 to $500 per pound), or cardamom ($30 per ounce). Less labour intensive and climatically fussy than saffron; without any of the pollination drams of vanilla; the harvesting quagmires of cloves or the complex choreography of cardamon collecting; and less prone to animal attacks than any of these, cinnamon, by dint of experiment and experience, has recommended itself as the lead spice that we grow at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, with bushes populating not just the Spice Garden itself but also several acres of hilly land that lie to the east and south east of the hotel, on Singing Civet Hill, and underplanted beneath aged coconuts that know no straight line.

Pepper is the second great indigenous spice for which Sri Lanka is rightly famous. It is one of only two food items (the other being salt) to have earned a place as an immutable fixture at every table in almost every part of the world. Yet this extreme popularity belies its opulent history. Food historians have dated pepper’s first origins to the Malabar Coast of India – present-day Kerala - and to around 2,000 BCE. By that time, Adam’s Bridge, that frail corridor of land that connects India with northern Sri Lanka, was already several thousand years old. Rising and falling sea levels meant that, over time, it became more or less walkable...

The first of these reticent herbals is moringa, a short-lived, fast-growing, ten-metre-high tree, indigenous to India and Sri Lanka. It matures with good-tempered ease, demanding merely tropical temperatures, water, and good drainage. Barely known outside Asia and Africa, it is a spice to covet. Every part of the plant is edible. Its leaves can be used in salads or boiled like spinach. Its flowers make an excellent tea, and its seed pods, when young, are a rare alternative to asparagus. Its taste is grassy, a little bitter with an agreeable horseradish-like heat and flavour, which explains why it is also known as the horseradish tree. According to several authoritative scientific studies of the plant, it is ridiculously healthy as well. Its dried leaves offer seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, nine times the protein of yoghurt, ten times the Vitamin A of carrots, and fifteen times the potassium of bananas. 

It is widely used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine to mitigate heart disease and as an anti-inflammatory, anti-cholesterol, antidepressant, and antioxidant. It may also help you see better and grow more luxurious hair. The ancient Greeks used it in perfume. The Egyptian pharaohs depended on it for their complex death rituals. Warriors consumed it before battle. And with far less drama, it is widely used in Sri Lankan cooking and in many of the rice and curries made here on The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It is a favourite addition to all things fish, and it stars with the most incredible lustre in the island’s celebrated Spicy Drumstick Curry dish. 

But if it’s a touch of fusion food you are really after, go down the moringa-as-asparagus route. Collect young, tender pods around a foot long before they become too woody. Trim them into smaller asparagus-like lengths, add the onion, butter, and salt, and boil for 10 minutes. Then steam the pods in a marinade of oil, vinegar, sea salt, pepper, garlic, and parsley and enjoy them with all the sophisticated delight that made Louis XIV’s obsessive consumption of asparagus so memorable as to figure in every contemporary Versailles diary. 

Another of the island’s lesser-known spices is brindleberry – known here as Goraka, or to give it its full and formal Latin honorific, Garcinia gummi-gutta. It is the Lewis Carroll of the spice world for the White Rabbit must have had its mercilessly caustic taste in mind as he wandered through Wonderland: “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer day: The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And took them quite away!” It is a slow-growing rainforest tree that reaches about 20 meters in height, with dark, shiny leaves and rough, black bark. It is an unfussy plant, growing happily so long as it has its roots in deep, well-drained, slightly acidic, light clay soil. In Ayurvedic medicine, it is used to treat ulcers and digestive problems. Western medicine is now busy studying its hydroxycitric acid content to better design medicines that increase fat burning whilst simultaneously reducing fat accumulation and appetite. Some scientists also believe it can help manage cholesterol, stabilise blood sugar levels, and protect the body from cell damage.

Goraka fruit, which resembles doll’s house-sized pumpkins, is first dried before its flesh is used in place of lime or tamarind to give dishes, especially fish dishes, a distinctly tart taste. The fruit badly needs this pre-preparation, as it is otherwise far too acidic to eat raw. Its most famous island offering is Ambulthiyal, the classic Sri Lankan sour fish curry, where, as part of a mix of spices, the fish turns the meat a stylish black as the walls of a Soho literary cocktail bar. 

Gotu Kola is another of the island’s demure indigenous species, something of a Mother Theresa amongst spices, awash with virtue and value. Known as pennywort or centella asiatica, it is a herbaceous perennial vegetable with small, round leaves that bud from soft stems, like a kind, apple-green version of watercress. It thrives in rich, moist soil, with plenty of shade and manure – the swampy edges of ponds are an especial favourite. The leaf has a subtle, earthy taste, sweet and bitter at once, and pairs exceptionally well with coconut. It is popular in traditional medicine, where it is believed to promote longevity and good vision. Modern science is catching up on the beneficial effects of its principal compounds – especially triterpenoid saponins, naturally occurring sugars. Studies suggest this has many applications: as an antiviral to inhibit the replication of viruses like herpes; as an antioxidant; as an anti-neoplastic to combat cancers; and to promote collagen production. Other studies are in progress to identify how it helps improve memory and support blood circulation.

In Europe, Gotu Kola has yet to make the leap from specialist natural food shops to supermarkets, but here in Sri Lanka, almost any vegetable shop sells it. It stars in many island dishes, but the two most famous are as a sambal – a salad where it is combined with coconut, onions, lime, tomatoes, and pepper - and as a porridge. Kola Kanda, or Gotu Kola Herbal Rice Porridge, to give it its full and formal name, is a comfort food that is ridiculously easy to make. Red rice and a bit of garlic are boiled up. Gotu Kola and curry leaves are blended into a dust, strained, and added to the cooked rice with coconut milk. The gorgeous green porridge is poured into breakfast bowls, and served with a piece of sweet jaggery – and so begins a better day. 

Curry leaves, the small pinnate leaves of the sweet neem tree, are a commonplace ingredient in Sri Lanka and are no longer the Mr Quiet of the spice world, becoming ever better known outside of South and SE Asia and China. It has even made its first tentative appearance at Sainsbury's and Tesco. It is a straightforward plant, growing well from cuttings and root divisions and afraid of few, if any, animals. It reaches heights of around four meters quickly, as long as it’s got decent sun. It tolerates all soil types and prolonged periods of dryness. It gives all the dishes it touches an earthy citrus-like flavour and a scent as if lemon grass and star anise had been twinned in some ecstatic horticultural coupling. It is especially delicious when fried with cashew nuts. Picked and used fresh off the tree, like basil in Italian cooking or marjoram in Greek dishes, there is almost no South Asian dish to which it cannot be added to deepen both flavour and scent. It has long been a staple ingredient in Ayurvedic medicine for treating skin and hair problems and for combating indigestion, bloating, and constipation. Western science is studying its various chemical properties, especially its carbazole alkaloids, to improve cancer and anti-inflammatory therapies. 

Despite the racial slur implicit in its common name, kaffir lime," Citrus Hystrix, as it is known in more Latin quarters, is an indigenous plant right across South and Southeast Asia. It most probably gained its ill-starred name through the Bantu slaves brought to Sri Lanka by the Portuguese, who were known by the generic term “kaffirs.”  One of its earliest appearances in Western literature is in Emanuel Bonavia’s 1888 book “The Cultivated Oranges, Lemons, etc. of India and Ceylon”. H.F. MacMillan also includes ...

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-intentioned 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 leases 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 tomato and pepper were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind fruit only the angriest chef might 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 e...

The most famous of these, chilli, a spicy vegetable widely used throughout Asia, only reached Asia in the past five hundred years, originating from Peru and Bolivia before being brought to the attention of a marvelling Spanish court by Christopher Columbus after his first voyage to the New World. In the diaries he kept on his journey, Columbus noted the existence of this new plant in an entry dated 15 January 1493, saying it was “a better spice than our pepper”. Within decades, chilli had become a commonplace plant in Spanish gardens. By the mid-fifteenth century, it was to be found as a cooking ingredient from Scandinavia to the Balkans. 

And almost as quickly, the plant also found its way to Sri Lanka, and other parts of Asia, due in large part to the Portuguese and their commercial thirst to control the Indian Ocean trade - and with it, its lucrative spice revenues. The spice’s adoption into Sri Lankan cooking came with an etymological twist for the Singhala term for pepper (“miris”) was transferred to chilli. Pepper was renamed “gam-miris” – literally “village pepper.”  Its penetration across the island seems to have been slow if the journals of Robert Knox, the famous British captive of the King of Kandy, are anything to go by. Knox’s book, “The Historical Relation of Ceylon”, published in 1681, recorded just about anything that moved and most things that didn’t. And it fails to mention chilli. More than anything else, this probably indicated the limited reach of the Portuguese settlement, which never properly incorporated the highlands of the Kandyan kingdom.

Rich in such vitamins as A, C and E, chilli’s natural chemical compounds, especially capsaicinoid, have prompted a wave of ongoing scientific research into harnessing it to promote weight loss, relieve pain from arthritis, reduce inflammation, control LDL (bad) cholesterol to lower the risk of strokes and heart attacks and regulate blood sugar.  Some studies have also indicated its potential use in killing cancer cells.

But it is, of course, for its taste and flavour that it is most widely celebrated. And in this regard, there are as many influences as there are outcomes. Different varieties of pepper, their ripeness, colour, drying process, and growing conditions – all influence how exactly they taste and smell. Smokey? Fruity? Grassy? Tart? Warm? Hot? Blistering? The vegetable’s extraordinary range and adaptability have ensured it can cover all these bases and more, making it one of the kitchen’s most flexible ingredients. From chilli pickle to chilli con carne, many dishes that incorporate chilli have become household favourites everywhere. Barely a dish in Sri Lanka fails to include it – from sambals and curries to the sweetly exquisitely spicy banana pepper curry - and of course Lunu Miris, one of the island’s top pickles, made from finely chopped onions, red chilli flakes, salt, lime juice, and Maldive fish, and able to go with just about anything. Foodies like to debate which cuisines tend to be hotter – Sri Lankan or Indian. But the answer is far from straightforward, as it all depends on which regions you have in mind: the Chettinad or Kandy, Galle or Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu or Jaffna?

Three other spices, vanilla, nutmeg and its derivative, mace, also all arrived on the island courtesy of European colonists. 

Although not hatched from a single silver egg like the mythical Molionidai twins Eurytos and Kteatos, nutmeg and mace are, all the same, the conjoined twins of the spice world, being two quite separate kinds of spices that derive from the same plant, Myristica fragrans. The nutmeg part of it is the hard, round seed found within the fruit; it has a robust, musky flavour, woody, a little sweet, and unmistakably aromatic. The mace is the reddish-orange membrane that surrounds the seed, with a scent that hardened Olfactors would describe as floral, citrus, light, and delicate.

The tree that bears them is slow-growing, deciduous, relatively narrow-spreading, but able to reach heights of 20 to 30 meters. As you would expect from such a special spice, the trees inhabit the fussy end of propagation, demanding rich, well-drained soil at around 500 meters, nicely distributed rainfall of about 2,500 mm per year, a decent amount of shade, especially in their first years, and temperatures that range from 20 to 30 degrees. 

The trees have a staggeringly limited commercial history, with all specimens worldwide deriving from plants that once grew only on the Banda Islands, a collection of islets that make up the 17,508 islands that comprise Indonesia today. Identified by the Portuguese as a primary source of revenue, the spice became one of the most tightly controlled monopolies of the Indian Ocean trade. The Arab traders who had been carrying and selling it across the region were muscled out, and until 1621, the Portuguese managed to keep trade in this spice to themselves. Naturally, this also meant a tight grip on production, and the various Portuguese governors across the East Indies took special care to ensure that no live plants escaped from Banda.

When the Dutch eventually stormed the Banda Islands and wrested control of nutmeg from the Portuguese, little else really changed. The Dutch VOC Company maintained as tight a grip on the production, transport, and marketing of spices as its colonial predecessors did. This state of affairs continued until 1810, when the British captured most of the Dutch East Indies territories, including the Banda Islands. Although the islands were returned to the Dutch 4 years later, the British had by then taken particular care to uproot as many nutmeg trees as possible for distribution and regrowth across their own Empire – including Sri Lanka, which it formally gained in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens. 

The monopoly was quietly ended a few years earlier, if reports of the French seizing a cargo of Dutch nutmeg trees and carrying them off to the Caribbean are to be believed. Either way, the nutmeg monopoly had been ended. By the early eighteenth century, the first nutmeg plantations in South Asia were recorded in Kerala, just across the sea from Sri Lanka itself, the work of an enterprising Scottish planter. Exactly when they came to Sri Lanka and where they were first planted is a matter of mildly rumbustious academic debate.

The global market for both species is relatively small in value, oscillating around 250 million dollars annually, with half coming from Indonesia and Sri Lanka accounting for about five per cent of the total, mostly from small plantations around Kandy, Kegalle, and Matale. But not Galagedera, sadly, for the nutmeg trees that once grew here had to be removed to safeguard the life of the miniature schnauzers that also live on The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. The spices’ active compound, myristicin, can easily kill a curious dog bent, as are our schnauzers, on chewing anything interesting they might find during their daily walks. B...

Known, not unjustifiably as “The Great,” Dutugemunu was to rescue his car crash of a dynasty, only to watch it (albeit from the life thereafter) speed off the proverbial royal road yet again, and with such casual ingratitude as to make common cause with Mark Twain - “if you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man”.

In the hundred years preceding Dutugemunu's ascension to the throne, the dynasty had been dethroned twice.  In the following hundred years they were to do it once more, this time with much greater injury to the state. 

Stability is rarely the embodiment of absolute monarchies, and Sri Lanka suffered more than most from almost institutionalised political volatility, as if, just below the surface of the realm, with the constant rumbling and tremors of a gathering earthquake, yet another government eruption was making itself ready.  

Instability haunted most of the dozen or so kings who succeeded Dutugemunu.  Five were rogue invaders from Tamil India; at least two were fated to be murdered by their scheming successors; and most of the rest reigned as if having signed up for a farce.

Only Dutugemunu and his later nephew, Valagamba, the Comeback King, were to move the kingdom progressively onwards.  For the rest, it was as if a life-changing ennui had floated into the palace throne room, a debilitating cloud that left every monarch much like Phil and Ralph in “Groundhog Day:

Phil: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was the same and nothing that you did mattered?"

 Ralph: "That about sums it up for me."

Had he had any presentiment of what was to come, it is probable that even Dutugemunu, so famously proactive as to make a Long-life Battery appear idle, would have chucked in his chips and moved on.  But thankfully, no plot-spoiling deity, soothsayer, or psychic was to interrupt his indomitable spirit, and for a glorious moment, it seemed as if the Vijayan good times had returned. The lucky dynasty was back in business.

Although history has been reluctant to tell us Dutugemunu's height, he was probably short, for if ever a leader existed with the Napoleon Syndrome, it was this man, whose nature, evident from the many myths and tales of his childhood, was naturally geared to dominate and control. “Growing duly, Gamani came to sixteen years, vigorous, renowned, intelligent and a hero in majesty and might,” reported The Mahavamsa, with an almost palpable sense of relief and thanksgiving.

Dutugemunu's path to the ruler of Lanka was far from straightforward, coming as he did from a lesser twig of the Vijayan family tree.

Despite these disadvantages, Dutugemunu famously navigated an obstacle course of family hurdles intended to arrest his monarchical ambitions.  He even made a point of conquering the many mini-Tamil fiefdoms that had sprung up around and possibly within the Rajarata during Ellara's reign – a far from straightforward task as the four-month siege of Vijitanagara illustrated.  

Here, having to calm his panicking elephants amid incessant Tamil attacks using “red-hot iron and molten pitch,” it was evident that the campaign was no walkover, but one that required planning and determination to ensure victory.  But the triumph was ultimately his. Power was consolidated, and his final victory over Ellara in 161 BCE left him ruling nearly the whole of the island, more territory by far than even that of the great king, Pandu Kabhaya.

And as if to confirm the return of Vijayan order, the construction of more buildings commenced. Anuradhapura expanded exponentially, with its infrastructure, utilities, and water resources so upgraded as to ensure it would flourish for centuries to come, the longest-surviving capital city of the Indian subcontinent.

Still more spectacular was the building of many more of what would become its most venerated celebrity structures. 

A large monastery, the Maricavatti, was erected, together with a nine-story chapter house for monks, with a bright copper-tiled roof; and most famous of all, what is today called the Ruwanweliseya, the Great Stupa, which housed Buddha’s begging bowl. 

The building programme was not restricted to the capital alone – eighty-nine other temples are said to have been constructed, along with hospitals and smaller tanks, in different parts of the kingdom.

The kingdom was return to order – precisely the kind of order that Megasthenes, the Greek historian based in India had noted just a hundred years earlier, relishing, with a commercial leer, the kingdom’s “palm-groves, where the trees are planted with wonderful regularity all in a row, in the way we see the keepers of pleasure parks plant out shady trees in the choicest spots;” and how the island was “more productive of gold and large pearls than the Indias." 

After decades of enemy occupation and an incipient civil war, the Anuradhapuran state found itself a welcome prodigal returning to the honeypot table of the Indian Ocean economy.  

Dutugemunu would have found little difficulty in rebooting trade, drawing back to its ports merchants from Arabia, Persia, India, East Asia and possibly even Rome; and, in so doing, wrenching back control of trade and custom dues from the merchants themselves for whom the laissez-faire regime of the earlier years had several commercial silver linings.

 Accompanying this structural reform and state-promoted capital investment was a new sense of nationalism.  Dutugemunu’s recapture of the Anuradhapura state, the second in just a few decades, was not just a return to power for the Vijayans but also for the budding Singhalese country, whose growing cultural differences with the kingdoms across the Palk Strait were accelerating as never before.  

“We own the country we grow up in,” the Sri Lankan writer Michael Ondaatje was to write thousands of years later: “or we are aliens and invaders”.

And own it they did, with Dutugemunu applying to the succession the most stringent of moral codes, most strikingly seen in how he disinherited his son Saliya, for having fallen for a girl from one of the lowest castes. 

The ailing king, dying before his eye-catching Ruwanweliseya Stupa was finished, ensured the throne passed instead to his own brother, Saddha Tissa, in 137 BCE; enjoying, as he did so, an experience rare for most Sri Lankan monarchs - a natural death. And what an end it was.

“Lying on a palanquin,” records The Mahavamsa’s compelling heart-on-sleeve account, “the king went thither, and when on his palanquin he had passed round the cetiya, going toward the left, he paid homage to it at the south entrance, and as he then, lying on his right side on his couch spread upon the ground, beheld the splendid Great Thupa, and lying on his left side the splendid Lohapasada, he became glad at heart, surrounded by the brotherhood of bhikkhus.”

For the next thirty-three years, it seemed as if life had gotten back to normal, or to whatever passed for normal amidst the seemingly indestructible building and gardens of Anuradhapura.&nb...

One hundred and fifty years earlier, and six thousand six hundred and one kilometres away, Thucydides, whose work, The Peloponnesian War, set such standards for history as to anticipate every conceivable future military and political ploy, had the perfect solution in mind to fend off the catastrophe that befall Sri Lanka on the death of their visionary king, Devanampiya Tissa in 267 BCE – or 207 BCE, depending on whether you accept the tempered chronology of such scholars as the impossibly talented Wilhelm Geiger.

That such advice could have been given or received is not as far-fetched as it first seems. The Mahavamsa refers to visits by what they call ‘yona’ to Sri Lanka in the fourth to third centuries BCE, ‘yona’ being the word the Persians used for their archenemy, the Greeks.  

Other chroniclers note how Pandu Kabhaya established a special quarter of his dazzling new city, Anuradhapura, for foreign merchants, including, it is suspected, the Yona Greeks, sometime after 437 BCE.

Just across the Palk Straits, in India’s current Bihar province, Megasthenes, the Greek Ambassador to the Maurya court around 290 BCE, was busy mixing with, amongst others, those very same Anuradhapuran Greeks who came to badger and barter with the Mauryas. 

Historian as he was himself, he was also the sort of bookish man who may have had a few spare scrolls of Thucydides’ main works to lend to the governing literati of the time, including the Sri Lankan kings and their associates.

But if there ever had been a loaning of scrolls, it seems that Devanampiya Tissa’s successors failed to read them. Indeed, they missed Thucydides’ most famous thoughts about the three “gravest failings,” namely “want of sense, of courage, or of vigilance”.

For it was the want of all three, especially the last of these attributes, which was to tip the Vijayan kingdom not once but twice into such long and shocking periods of surrender that for well over half the intervening century it was a kingdom under occupation; its great city of Anuradhapura recast with a Tamil polish; and its plaintiff kings killed or exiled.

Back in 267 BCE, as Devanampiya Tissa moved into what all would have hoped to have been Pari-Nirvana (the post-nirvana state of total release), this was far from what anyone would have thought even remotely possible. The great kingdom was utterly solid, surely? Unbreakable. Resilient. Or was it?

For glum historians inclined to search for the deepest runes and trumpet them loudly, Devanampiya Tissa’s death was actually the start of a bleak three-hundred-year promenade that would lead to the dynasty’s inevitable collapse, a journey that would also fatally embed the country with an ongoing appetite for incipient disaster, regardless as to which dynasty, president, or occupying invader was calling the shots.

Over this sorrowful period, through the reigns of almost 30 kings, Sri Lanka was to enjoy just three short periods of peace; interspersed with three Tamil invasions and occupations; several decades of continuous regicide; and a concluding civil war in which the Vijayans turned their spears dhunnas (bows), muguras (clubs), adayatiyas (javelins), kaduwas (swords) and kunthas (spears) upon one another until there was no credible heir left standing, merely an preposterous and fleeting lookalike monarch, until he too was murdered by a group of nobles for whom enough was quite enough.

No one saw the turmoil that lay ahead.  

That such chaos should await did not seem even wildly probable as Devanampiya Tissa’s brother, Uththiya, succeeded to the throne. 

He was to be followed by two more brothers, Mahasiwa and Surathissa, all three of them, according to The Mahavamsa, ever on the side of neatness, to rule for respectably lengthy periods of ten years apiece. 

Whether they died in their beds or were murdered by their successors over these thirty years is a guessing game for clowns. 

The Mahavamsa maintains a prim muzzle on the matter. Indeed, the period was suspiciously uneventful; unnervingly calm even. All seemed fine with the state – and yet something, somewhere, was going fatally wrong. “What goes up,” said Isaac Newton, “must come down.”

At best, it is probable that nothing happened, merely a governing indolence that spread like rising damp or unseen termites.  

Perhaps all three brothers were so distracted by the promise of enlightenment as they got to grips with the new religion their brother had introduced, that they forgot about all other aspects of good governance.  Of vigilance, there was none; and over time, the kingdom’s defences and its ability to dominate and control its own destiny became fatally compromised as events were to show later.

For Uttiya, his role must at times have seemed more chief mourner than king as first one and then another all-consuming state funerals took place, the like of which the country had never seen.

First to go was Mahinda, prince, monk, missionary, and saint, “the light of Lanka,” who had first brought Buddhism to the island from India.  

Dying aged eighty in 205 BCE, he was considered to have become an Arhat, one who, having gained insight into the true nature of existence, had been most happily liberated from the troublesome cycle of rebirth.  Uttiya assiduously collected the evangelist’s relics and busied himself constructing stupas over them, laying him to rest with a single hair of Lord Buddha in Mihintale’s stunning Ambasthala Stupa, surrounded by two tall rows of slender stone pillars carved with lions, birds and dwarfs. 

Hardly had he or the country recovered from this devastating, step-changing bereavement than a second struck just two years later when Sangamitta, Mahinda’s sister, bearer of the bo-tree, princess, nun, and saint, died just a year short of eighty.  

Once again, King Uttiya busied himself with stupa-building, erecting the Sangamiththa Stupa over her ashes in Anuradhapura, his own reign drawing to a shattered end just a few years later.

He was succeeded by his brother, Mahasiwa, whose own ten-year rule, from 257 BCE – 247 BCE, goes almost as unremembered - apart from the fact that he built the Nagarangana Monastery, whose location is now the subject of modest arguments. 

The king, noted The Mahavamsa approvingly, was especially careful to protect “the pious”. He was said to have been very close to one of Mahinda’s principal followers, Thera Bhaddasara, a relationship that may further indicate how preoccupied the crown was with matters spiritual rather than temporal. 

By the time Mahasiwa’s brother (or possibly uncle) Surathissa took the throne in 247 BCE, things were clearly going most seriously wrong, and the young country would have been wise to take to heart the words of the Egyptian writer, Suzy Kassem: “Never follow a follower. It's why the whole world is falling apart.”  

For by now the kingdom itself was falling apart. It had become so ineptly run and poorly defended as to lay itself wide open to invasion – the first recorded invasion of the country from South India. 

Three kings, and three decades on from the...

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 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 amongst 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, whose products are typically 22 carats or less. It lies close...

One house in one street stands out, the J. K. Rowling of the area, confident, plush, sophisticated, discriminating, and flush with Sauvignon Blanc. For in D for “Doneraile Street,” is where one of London’s most agreeable book groups meets. Membership is by invitation only, and its invitations are as infrequent as dry days in Wales. 

There are more famous book groups - Daunts, for example or the Literary Lounge Book Club. But none so naughtily notorious as this. Blissfully undemocratic, it seethes behind silk curtains and French shutters; its gardens giving out to imported fig trees and olives; its tables glittering with canapes of citrus-cured seabass on blinis.

But for months it has been the centre of reckless disagreements and tormented tiffs – for its members struggled with that eternal book club question: which book to read next. Their discussions, like Middle Eastern peace negotiations, were marred by insurmountable differences - until, that is, they hit upon a winning solution, proposed by a member who had just returned from a holiday in Kandy.

Stick with novels from Sri Lanka, she said.

And so, somewhat unexpectedly, they did.  Harmony upon harmony has followed, it seems, like the notes of a celestial harp. And so it could for you too – for this guide offers a similar and blameless escape route to pleasure. It presents a long list of books that will keep you going for a good long time. A year at least. Sufficient time to give up the day job and move your grocery shopping to online deliveries only.

The unexpected books included in this guide will take you into all the most comforting and familiar genres. But it will then upend them with the most surprising of settings, perspectives, voices, and approaches, as if you’ve found a trove of mille-feuille in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Drive-Through.  

Surprise, delight, glee – that is barely the half of it. For the books assembled here are as much a travelogue for the body as for the mind; a history of the recent world as well as a picture of worlds to come – or even worlds framed forever in the most necessary of Forevers, like psychedelic carnivals or enchanted forests.

They needed them most certainly. The merest glance tells you that the mainstream literary world has slipped into an odd torpor. As literary agents in London and New York whip their submissions into shape and tease them through the hoops, auctions, and cheque books of commissioning editors at Frankfurt, you may be forgiven for thinking that reading contemporary fiction is similar to eating a custard cream biscuit.  It’s nice enough.  But it’s as predictable as a dollop of AI creative writing.

Sri Lanka offers an opportunity to escape this literary listlessness. Through, why? You may disputatiously ask: why Sri Lanka? Why not another one of the world’s 200-odd countries?  Surely you can formulate a reading list for any country in the world. 

Or can you? Few other countries are currently producing as much world-class literature as Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s contemporary writers have burst onto the world fiction scene like firecrackers. Try just a few, and you will see. 

But which few? Of its multitude of authors and books, which ones should you start with?

This guide brings together many of the best, in one sense or another, Sri Lankan. 

Most were born on the island; others left, often part of the diaspora created by civil war and corruption. But whether now in Canada and Australia, the UK, or New Zealand, each has written a novel only a Sri Lankan could, bringing humour, a unique sensibility and a sharp, ironic eye to the themes that preoccupy every great novel - from war, sex, fashion, addiction and love to loss, pets, the jungle, fame, fortune, bankruptcy. 

And, of course, family; for in Sri Lanka, as almost nowhere else, the family really does come - inconveniently, beautifully, reassuringly, alarmingly - first. 

The story starts relatively late, for although many inspired novels were written in the first half of the twentieth century, it was not until the 1960s that a trenchant new sensibility began to shape and flavour Sri Lanka’s fiction.  

A band of new writers emerged for whom little was out of bounds - from the incipient civil war, belief, ethnicity, and feminism to gender, and, of course, the perennial themes of the island: family, love, the jungle, loss, and living.

Take Carl Muller and his famous trilogy, which is to Sri Lankan literature what John Galsworthy’s “Forsyte Saga” is to England or “The Godfather” is to New York. A saga writer first and best, he is rightly celebrated for the three books he published from 1993 onwards about the Burghers of Sri Lanka as told through “The Jam Fruit Tree,” “Yakada Yaka”, and “Once Upon a Tender Time.” 

His trilogy unpacks a time when the world was golden, a kinder halcyon life that the later civil war would render almost unbelievable. 

A much darker world is inhabited by Michael Ondaatje, whose novel “The English Patient” catapulted him to global recognition. In 2000, “Anil’s Ghost” came out, one of his most impressive works, a mystery set in Sri Lanka and riven with love and fear, identity, and antiquity. 

But “sometimes,” wrote Cassandra King, the Queen of Southern storytelling, “we laugh to keep from crying.” And Romesh Gunesekera does just this with his novel “Reef,” a slow-burning tale of a young chef so committed to pleasing a seafood-obsessed master that he is oblivious to the unravelling of his own country. 

But for something less cathartically seismic, there is Yasmine Gooneratne. Usually, to be an academic, teaching English literature is a necessary condition to disqualify you from ever writing good novels. 

But not Gooneratne, whose novel “The Sweet and Simple Kind” is one of the greatest friendship novels you will encounter. Set in the newly independent nation, this coming-of-age tale of two cousins, Tsunami and Latha, intertwines with language and religion, politics and privilege, humour, and passion. It will keep you up all night long. 

It was published the same year another author, Nihal De Silva, died, a victim of a land mine explosion at the Wilpattu National Park. One of the country’s most talented thriller writers, his war story, “The Road from Elephant Pass”, won a place in the hearts of all readers for its story of the LTTE Tamil woman and her Sinhalese army officer.

And then, as if by magic, the island’s writers moved on, articulating a measured and confident certainty, writing across any genre, in whatever way they chose, whatsoever. It was as if Elsa’s lion cubs in Forever Free had picked up pens and got to work. And with their new creative liberty came the most compelling insights into the sensibilities of the people they...

And remarkably, each beast shares a close and initial affinity with those other, and still more famous, Big Three “B’s” of the classical music world: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. 

The buffalo, that most solid, refined, and traditional of creatures ever seen in all corners of the island, is the Bach of the mammalian world. 

The wild boar, with its laudable pack control and mastery of its environment, is the unmistakable Brahmas of the jungle and grassland, blending the complexity of its world with ease.

And the bear, of course, is the Beethoven of the country: powerful, introspective, heroic.

 “It seems,” wrote Beethoven in his most bear-like mood, “as if every tree said to me, 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express the ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed.”  

As to the Sri Lankan sloth bear, although it is most often found in the dry zones of the country – such as Yala and Wilpattu – it is never far from trees, for in the trees it finds the ants, honey, and fruit it especially loves. 

Hanging like the strangest of fruits themselves, they will stay in the branches for hours at a time, often bringing cubs with them to join the feast.  Having feasted, it will usually then continue to hang on in the most relaxed of ways, enabled by twenty sharp, curved claws that give them the kind of grip that denture wearers can only dream about. 

To see one suspended in so complete a seventh heaven is, of course, to call immediately to mind the Allegretto or "Shepherd's song” from Beethoven’s Pastoral itself – that moment when all that remains is pure gratitude and celebration of the tranquillity of the natural world.

Even so, the bear is easily tempted to descend from its high table for termites – a food item of indulgent delight, for which their highly mobile snouts are exceptionally well designed. With nostrils closed, the snouts become vacuums, sucking out the termites from their nest. And their long claws enable them to dig the nest ever deeper till the last juicy termite has been consumed. 

Sri Lanka’s Sloth Bear is a unique endemic subspecies of the very same sloth bear that inhabits the Indian subcontinent, in ever-declining numbers from India to Bhutan, Nepal, and, until recently, Bangladesh. 

It is a little smaller in size than its Indian cousin, with shorter fur and, sadly, sometimes without the cuddly-looking white tummy fur of its northern relative. Even so, it is no midget, typically measuring six feet in length and weighing in at up to 300 pounds for a male or 200 pounds for a female. 

Once found in plentiful numbers across the island, they are now in severe decline, with an estimated 500-1000 bears in the wild today. The destruction of their habitats has been instrumental in their decline, but the fear they engender amongst village populations has also played its part. They are often hunted and killed, with a reputation for damaging property and killing or maiming domestic animals, humans running like a wave of terror before them. 

The “sloth” part of their name is somewhat misleading, for the bears are quite capable of reaching speeds of thirty miles an hour – faster than the fastest human yet recorded. 

Evolution has cast the sloth bear towards the Grumpy Old Man side of the mammalian spectrum – brooding, bothered, and bold, as if Beethoven’s late soul-searching Sonata No.32 in C minor, Op.111 had assumed a furry life of its own. Its poor sight and hearing leave it very dependent on its sense of smell, so it can all too often be surprised by what seems like the abrupt appearance of something threatening – like a human – which it will attack with warrior-like ferocity before asking any questions. In this, the bear

It is very solitary, living alone in the forest except for those rare moments when it seeks a mate. Reproduction is not its strongest skill, and most females produce a single cub that stays with them for two to three years, the first months of which are endearingly spent living or travelling on its mother's back. 

D.J.G. Hennessy, a policeman who had a couple of bears on his land in Horowapotana in 1939, noted the emotive articulateness of their paw-sucking.  Hed wrote that “ the significance of the notes on which the bear sucks his paw is interesting; a high whine and rapid sucking denotes impatience and anger, a deep note like the humming of a hive full of bees on a summer’s day indicates that he is contented and pleased with life, a barely audible note shows great happiness while a silent suck in which he usually indulges in just before going to sleep on a full stomach denotes the acme of bliss”.  It was as if, Hennessy might have added, had he been as musically minded as he was bear minded, the bear was playing out his own version of the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 - the "Ode to Joy".

Just as Brahms was seen to take Beethoven’s music to its best and logical conclusion, so too does the Sri Lankan Wild Boar complete some of the limitations of the sloth bear. Unlike the bear, the boar is exquisitely social, living in groups – or sounders. This word originates from 14th-century Norman French to collectivise a group of wild pigs who communicate constantly with grunts and squeals.

Like the famous Mosuo from the Yongning lakes of China – one of the world's last remaining matrilineal societies – wild boar packs are centred around an old and necessarily dominant sow who is in charge of all that they get up to – where they rest or eat, wallow, swim, play or grub. Each sounder pack is made up of several generations of boar – all females and younger males, often numbering 20 beasts. By at least their second year, the males will lope off to live alone, like blokes in sheds, returning to the sounder merely to mate, although some have been known to form temporary bachelor groups, like flat-shares for men learning to break free.

Mating, like all good things, follows the weather patterns: most encounters occur during the monsoon from September to early March, and very little, if anything, occurs during the dry seasons of June to August.  Occasionally, the more eager beasts produce two litters a year. Still, one is the norm, relying on the not inconsiderable investment of days of gestation and usually six little piglets to show for the effort. And in true Mosuo style, where couples living in close domestic harmony and fathers staying to be a key part of the household is regarded as a shocking eccentricity, the male boar, having done his bit, will jog off back to his introverted life.

Their communicative skills are not unlike those of Brahams himself, with a sound scope that moves from the softest pianissimos to the loudest fortissimos by way of full harmonies, raw registers, and lush orchestration. Low- to medium-frequency grunts maintain group cohesion. Soft purring denotes contentment, and rhythmic grunts denote courtship. Low-frequency growls suggest aggression; squeaks and squeals suggest excitement, their rising amplitude indicating distress rather than elation. A low huffing “Uh...

But this he failed to do and so, aged 12, I was left wondering just how on earth the world would motor itself forward, and go round and round, given the unhelpful existence of such hermits as myself.  Of course, hermits often love, but given their predictably sequestered impact, the effect is like being licked by a gerbil. Not enough to really help the world go round and round. And round.

Quite how I got away with it, being brought up in a country then so explosively fecund that the Prime Minister’s younger son set about furtively and forcibly sterilizing any male within sight, was itself a miracle.  Of course, he failed.   Utterly.  In the ten years from my arriving in India and then leaving it, the population jumped 100 million.  And not just there.  Everywhere.  More and more people, making the world go round, with love.  

The battalions of shrinks who spent so much effect making me into the balanced, burnished, and pleasing figure that I am today, never really explained what happened when or why to make me so.  But hermiting, to coin verb, is a very pleasing occupation. And I am certainly getting better at it.

It was a challenge to do well in India, at boarding school, university or in any of the vortex-inducing publishing houses that greedily besotted me during an early career enthusiasm.  But here, in the jungles of central Sri Lanka, it works much better.

The path of a hermit is rarely straightforward, especially if you are the sort that prefers looking upon caves, lighthouses, and abandoned windswept islands, rather than living in them.  Why, after all, should hermitting be shorn of books, champagne, a good chef, or opera?  Not everyone is St Paul, content with dates and bread, or likes dining off leather shoes, like the Siberian hermit Agafia Lykova.

Clearly there are degrees in hermiting, as in any condition or occupation - though my friends still chuckle and snigger at my career choice to run a hotel.  That, they claim, is merely a perverse attempt to have ones cake and eat it.  For, of course, you can’t hermit 24/7 in a hotel.  In a hotel hermitting is intermittent.  Like the building of Rome, it cannot be achieved in a full day.  There are guests to greet, help, welcome and part with.  Suppliers of everything from diesel to devilled cashews to meet.  An unending parade of plumbers, electricians, garbage collectors, Wi-Fi repairers, gar deliverers dancing up the estate road in duets with government agents, tuk tuks, lost policemen, cinnamon peelers, monkeys and falling mangos.

But all of this misses that one essential point: hotels nurture hermiting.  Ravi Shankar, Coco Chanel, Clinty Eastwood all lived in hotels.  And look at what they achieved.  “When you get into a hotel room,” noted Diane von Furstenberg, “you lock the door, and you know there is a secrecy, there is a luxury, there is fantasy. There is comfort. There is reassurance.”  

Amongst well-informed hermits, arguments rage gently over what type of hotel offers the best hermiting.  And at first glance you would seemed utterly spoiled for choice here in Sri Lanka.  It lists over 10,000 places as providing accommodation.  However, closer inspection shows that just a quarter of these places are classified as hotels  And of those just 8% (200) are rated as 5-star.  

For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visit Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most of these 200 hotels are small private operations - authentically boutique in a world that has heartlessly commoditized the word.  

Thankfully, the hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world – Taj, Sheraton, Marriot, Starwood, Meridian, etc. – have yet to put in much of an appearance here.  Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality. 

My Colombo hermitage of choice is the Colombo Court Hotel & Spa, a much overlooked habitat of calm sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road. Alternatively, Tintagel offers unquestionable peace, a far cry from its 1956 tabloid moment when the radical Prime Minster S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, seated on its veranda, was shot dead by a Buddhist priest whose business affairs had gone awry - the first leader of the modern state to be murdered – but not the last.  

For those who prefer Colombo hermitting in massive edifices, there is Cinnamon Grand; the Hilton, one of the first globally branded hotels to wash up on Colombo’s then more parochial shores in 1987; or the Shangri-La, an odd offshoot of China’s Belt-and-Braces mission.  Two others are worth hermitting in just for their restaurants: YUMI at the Taj Samudra Or Yue Chuan at The Kingsbury.  Others offer a dash of colonial theatre: wedding watching at the 1806 Mount Lavinia Hotel or the Crow Man at the Galle Face Hotel.  This once modest Dutch Guesthouse flourished when the Suez Canal turned the tickle of eastward bound Europeans into a river bobbing with the likes of Noel Coward, Che Guevara, Yuri Gagarin, or  Nixon. But the ultimate prize for Colombo hotel hermits is Number 11, a rambling architectural museum with just two rooms to let.  Here in Geoffray Bawa’s private town house, you have the entire gorgeous assemblage of curios and masterpieces to yourself once the day trippers have gone.

But it is to the south that most hotels lie, near or on the beaches where hermitting can be combined with imaging you are washed up on a desert island, albeit one that serves cocktails. Galle, the beguiling navel of the south, offers Fort Printer’s, the Galle Fort Hotel, Fort Bazaar, or the Amangalla, their verandas places from which to watch the busy world worry past.  And just outside the town is The Sun House,  built by a Scottish spice merchant in the 1860s,  Pedlar's Manor, with its heartfelt collection of vintage cars; or The Fortress, overlooking stilt fishermen,

Go on eat or west from Galle and your fall into the sort of luxury preferred by shy celebrities, or discarded Western prime ministers: the Amanwella, in Tangalle; Malabar Hill, or Cape Weligama in Weligama; Yala’s Wild Coast Tented Lodge, a cluster of seed pod ocean villa-etts; or Kahanda Kanda, an indulgence of cloistered English country style villas that have happily woken up in a more tropical wonderland than Hampshire, Harrogate, or Hartlepool.

For most hotels, the east remains frontier country – but even there you can hermit happily at The Spice Trail, or Jetwing Surf in Arugam Bay.  The tea country gives you Living Heritage in God’s Forest; 98 Acres, Ceylon Tea Trails; The Grand or St Andrew’s, two hotels that hark back to the days when Nuwara Eliya was the Little England to whose cool climate homesick planters could cleve.  For virtuous hermits seeking a triptych (solitude, scenery, and a good cuppa), there is Amba, a 130 acre organic farm, the centre of the growing artisanal tea movement on the island and a true social enterprise.

Head north and you hit upon two front runners of local chains, any of whose hotels are lovely: Jetwing Mahesa Bhawan in Jaffna and Uga Ulagalla, Anuradhapura.  But it is Geoffray Bawa’s Kandalama Hotel that wins ...

Even so, of the many mighty mammals that once sat, enthroned, like Phidias’ Olympian Zeus gazing at the lesser world around him, so too did a dazzling assembly of cats lord it over the island, at the very apex of Sri Lanka’s food chain. Some of the most glamorous members of this ancient feline club have long since vanished, predators who themselves fell prey, not to other predators but to climate change and the accompanying alterations in vegetation. 

Others, thriving, or perhaps now just clinging on to life with grim resilience in other corners of the world, never made it to the island in the first place. This, today, is not the country where you might glimpse cougars, lynx, ocelot, or jaguars slipping stealthily through scrub forests. 

But, as benefits of one the world’s most notable biospheres, the island has instead as astonishing variety of surviving predator cats, truly the cat’s pyjamas, including one that has moulded its appearance so intimately around a particular environment that scientists have eagerly given it endemic status three times over, with a fourth, identified from a small town near Nuwara Eliya, waiting for taxological promotion like a good, albeit dead man before the Catholic Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

Today, tourists come in teeming numbers to catch a glimpse of the Ceylon Leopard. Indeed, some are so overwrought if denied the sight they are wont to demand their money back from hapless safari operators. For the leopard, shrewd, secretive, elusive, has its own quite firm ideas about just to whom and when it might offer itself up for a selfie. 

It is without doubt the most extraordinary endemic jewel in Sri Lanka’s mammalian crown and the largest of the country's cat species.  Unlike other leopards, notably those in India, it has no other rival predators, and this has led to remarkable evolution, making Sri Lanka’s leopards a separate and quite distinct subspecies found only on the island.

This lack of competition has helped account for their size: averaging six feet in length, head to tail, and weighing up to 220 pounds, making them larger than other leopard species.

Solitary and with a life expectancy of around 15 years, it is also far less aggressive than others and quite comfortable hunting both day and night, rather than restricting itself to the usual nocturnal habits of its Indian counterpart. It is beautifully attuned to hunting, an observer noting that “if the lion is the king of the jungle, then the leopard is the king of stealth,” able to run at 70 kilometres an hour and leap as far as 6 metres.

Despite habitats that stretch right across the island, it prefers the cooler highlands – places like Horton Plains, for example – and has developed thicker fur and fat layers to stay warm. This fussiness has probably told against it: the actual numbers of the Sri Lankan Leopard are falling fast and are currently estimated at just eight hundred. Conservation methods have failed to have a meaningful impact on the population as a whole, and there is little sense of urgency in government circles about the pressing need to protect this apex predator's future. Habitat loss, along with a disastrous history of human-animal interaction, is primarily to blame for this decline. Still, if nothing is done soon, the Sri Lanka Tourist Board may have to turn to promoting monkeys. 

It is also differentiated from other leopards by its rosettes, which are closer-set and smaller than those of any other species. And an errant gene in the leopard population provides the rarest of leopards, the Black Leopard, of whom there have been only a few firm sightings. One in every three hundred leopards born has the propensity to be black and so able to live up to Karl Lagerfeld’s gimlet observation: “One is never overor underdressed with a little black dress.”

Thousands of years ago, it had much more competition from wild cats that were much larger and more fearsome.  And the spectral remains of three of these giants of the cat world live on in the minds of those wise enough to be ever mindful of history. Indeed, the simple process of discovering these beasts made searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack look like a walk in the park. Traces – the odd bit of tooth or chip of bone – emerged during long, hard digs by dedicated biologists in parts of the country not renowned for their embarrassment of facilities, hotels, bars or even air-conditioned rooms. But the reward of finding these lost clues was immense, throwing open the country’s far distant past to a yet more diverse era where Alpha mammals came with stripes or beards, not just spots.

The first of these, still adoring the national flag, is the Sri Lankan lion, thought to have become extinct in 37,000 BCE – about the same time as the famous Stone Age Balangoda Man walked his last steps. Panthera leo Sinhaleyus, as the subspecies is known, only came to light in 1936 when the archaeologist P.E.P. Deraniyagala uncovered two fossilised teeth in Kuruwita, near Ratnapura. With the passion of an Hercule Poirot, the archaeologist studied his modest clutch of teeth. One was so damaged as to be of little use in identifying the animal, but the other, a left molar presented so distinctive a structure as to not just twin it with lions but set it apart from all known species too. 

From this single tooth, a lost subspecies was uncovered, its size indicating that the beast was a lion much larger than the present-day Indian lion. Back in 37,000 BCE, Sri Lanka was a very different place from what it would become, an island of open grasslands, a habitat perfect for lions. But over time, as the monsoon rainforest fuelled the proliferation of trees, its habitat became ever more restricted, and eventually the creature died out. The National Flag aside, the lion still lives on in many a temple and ancient fortress, in statues and even in biscuits and breweries.

A more recent, albeit extinct, competitor was uncovered, with a set of scant but intriguing fossil records of a Tiger (Panthera tigris). These telling fossils include a left lower tooth found near Ratnapura in 1962 and a subfossil paw bone dated to 16,500 years, found near Kuruwita. Tigers appear to have arrived in India some 12,000 years ago and spread from there to Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. But it seems that it was not this tiger subspecies that wandered across the then-existing land bridge from India to Sri Lanka – but another one altogether, native to central Asia, eastern and northern China, Japan, northern Siberia, Sumatra, and Java. Little else is known of this now long departed mammal whose spectral remains sadly disproves the old German proverb “There is no off switch on a tiger.”

The last of these great competitors was the Ceylon Asiatic Cheetah. A distinctly different version of the African Cheetah, the Asiatic Cheetah once roamed the world from Arabia and the Caspian Sea to South Asia and Sri Lanka, until around 10,000 years ago. Today, they are no longer found in Sri Lanka. In Asia, their numbers are so few that all but the most myopically optimistic enthusiasts anticipate that it will soon cease to live in the wild at all, instead living a tragic mock life in cheetah-print onesies and thongs.

Three small c...

Troubled by the sheer lack of scientific information about the behaviour of the Ceylon Spotted Deer, the Department of Zoology at Sri Lanka’s Eastern University conducted a detailed study of a particular population in Trincomalee. After months of observation, they concluded, reassuringly, that “their main activities were feeding and play.” Scientists are much divided on the subject of animal play, and tortured monographs have been written attempting to pin down the very concept of animal play. To some, it is merely an evolutionary byproduct; others claim it ensures animals teach one another about fairness and consequences. That the Sri Lankan Axis Deer should be minded to play at all is encouraging for it is an increasingly vulnerable species, its preferred habitats - lowland forests, and shrub lands –are shrinking, and with it the grasses, leaves, and fruit it lives on. Their numbers are now counted in the thousands. They live in herds of up to one hundred and are seen by leopards, bears, crocodiles, jackals, and hungry villagers as living supermarkets of fresh meat. Standing up to a hundred centimetres high, their delicately white spotted fawn coats present them as everything a perfect deer ought to be, as is appropriate for an animal that is part of the island’s select few endemic mammals.

The Mouse Deer, or Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain, has evolved so dramatically that it presents scientists with the opportunity to grant it full endemic status as the Sri Lankan Spotted Chevrotain.  Barely twelve inches high, it lives scattered in the forests of South & Southeast Asia. The Sri Lankan variant mostly sticks to the dry zones, especially Wilpattu, Udawalawa, and Sigiriya. It is tiny, gorgeous, even-toed and, unless you are a plant, entirely harmless– although popular superstition adds the caveat that a man who gets scratched by the hind foot of one will develop leprosy. This has yet to be verified by scientists. 

Tiny too is the Hog Deer – barely seventy centimetres tall.  It has short legs, a predilection to whistle, fine antlers and dark brown fur.  It actually looks nothing like a pig but gains that interspecies appellation for its tendency to rush through the forest, head down like one of the racing pigs at Bob Hale Racing Stables in far-off Michigan. Stretching across the grasslands of Sri Lanka and South and Southeast Asia, it is now classified as highly vulnerable, with its small herds shrinking amid habitat loss.

Less threatened is the Indian Muntjak or Barking Deer.  Carefree and with a propensity to eat almost anything, the Barking Deer is a cuddly irritant in the jungle and on low-hill estates, its numbers flourishing across South and Southeast Asia. It grows to around sixty centimetres in height and is covered in reddish brown fur and, for males, throws in a modest set of antlers. Shy, solid, rarely seen in numbers more than two, it gets its name for the dog-barking sound it makes when alarmed. It is a modest, if reliable breeder, with pregnancies lasting six months after which one or, occasionally, two pups are born.

But among the island deer, the Sambar Deer claims the title of the largest and most impressive of the several deer species with which it shares genes. Within Sri Lanka, the species has evolved further and teeters on the edge of being declared endemic, as the Sri Lankan Sambar (Rusa unicolour). Much mistaken for an elk by early British colonists eager to shoot it, it can be seen in herds in places like Horton Plains – but it is classified as highly vulnerable all the same. It is a tempting target for poachers stocking up on game meat to sell, and the pressures on its grassland habitats are not getting any easier. Typically one and a half metres high (sometimes more), their herds consist of females with their fawns, which they usually produce yearly. The males, like men with sheds who have taken the designation to extremes, prefer to live alone - except when the mating urge overcomes them. Fossil records from tens of thousands of years earlier show the existence of a now-extinct ancestor, the Muva Sinhaleya, a species of Sambur smaller than the one alive today.

Distant relations of a sort are the Ponies of Mannar.  Strung out to the west of Jaffna in the Palk Strait is the tiny coral island of Delft, covering fifty square miles and home to less than five thousand people—and five hundred wild ponies. Dotted with Baobab trees, archaeological marvels from ancient to colonial times, and abundant wildlife, Delft has become the last refuge for the Sri Lankan Wild Pony, the direct descendant of the ponies exported to the island by the Portuguese and Dutch from Europe and their colonies in the East, to provide basic transportation. Left behind at Independence, and superseded by cars and lorries, they have carved out a fringe existence on the hot, dry island, fighting off as best they can dehydration and occasional starvation. The Wildlife Department has since offered them greater protection. Still, if there are any deep-pocketed millionaires out there dissatisfied by the sight of the likely heirs, the wild ponies of Delft offer a much more attractive option for legacies and reputational garnishing.

No less threatened are Sri Lanka’s diminishing herds of feral donkeys.  Found mainly in Mannar, Talaimannar and Puttalam, they are descendants of equine immigrants that entered the great port of Maathottam near Mannar - once the shipping gateway to the ancient Anuradhapura Kingdom. Arab traders were probably most responsible for importing the beasts to carry their cargoes inland. The species that lives here is said to be a direct descendant of the Nubian African Wild Ass, now extinct in its native Ethiopia and Sudan. Extinction also faces it in Sri Lanka, where its habitat is diminishing by the day, and hungry villagers occasionally help themselves to what will become tomorrow’s stew. There are said to be fewer than 3,000 still alive, and a fantastic charity, Bridging Lanka, has stepped in to try to nurse them back to happier times.

The last of the island’s deer-like beasts is the Gaur, or Indian Bison.  Once common throughout South and Southeast Asia, the Gaur is moving inexorably towards extinction, with just 21,000 mature individuals remaining. Related to yaks and water buffalo, they are the largest of all wild cattle and outrank in size only by elephants, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus among land mammals. The Ceylon Gaur (Bibos Sinhaleyus Deraniyagala) is a distinct subspecies that used to be found in Sri Lanka but was last spotted by British adventurers in 1681 in the menagerie of King Rajasinghe II of Kandy – though the Sri Lankan government recently proposed to its Indian counterpart that they send half a dozen gaur to the island as part of a reintroductio...