SRI LANKANS BORN TO LEAD...

For a small island, Sri Lanka has many nicknames: Serendib, Ceylon, Teardrop of India, Resplendent Isle, Island of Dharma, Pearl of the Orient. This colourful collection reveals its richness and beauty, and the intensity of the affection it evokes in its visitors.

The beach thing may be a cliche, but don't miss them. Then head to the hills to cool off amidst tea plantations and ancient cities. The island teems with bird life, and even the occasional elephant or leopard. To top it all off, the people are friendly, the food is delicious and costs are low.

Sigiriya is a famous and nearly impregnable natural fortress, at whose base the parricide Kasyapa built a palace where he lived from 477 to 511 in fear of his brother's revenge. It came, and the fortress proved of little use: in the heat of battle, a wheeling movement by Kasyapa was interpreted by his own troops as retreat. They fled, leaving him to kill himself. The palace and refuge were abandoned.

In 1828, the hard-driving Governor Edward Barnes ordered the construction of a road--about 40 miles long--from Peradeniya, elevation 1,000 feet, up to the Nuwara Eliya plateau, elevation over 6,000.  The British had known of the place for a decade, but the road put it on the map.  Nuwara Eliya's mystique grew when Sir Samuel Baker lived here from 1846 to 1855.  Baker himself explained the appeal: "a poor and miserable wretch I was upon my arrival at this elevated station, suffering not only from the fever itself, but from the feeling of an exquisite debility that creates an utter hopelessness of the renewal of strength.   I was only a fortnight at Nuwara Eliya.  The rest-house was the perfection of everything that was dirty and uncomfortable.  The toughest possible specimen of a beefsteak, black bread and potatoes, were the choicest and only viands obtainable for an invalid.  There was literally nothing else; it was a land of starvation.  But the climate!  What can I say to describe the wonderful effects of such a pure and unpolluted air?  Simply, that at the expiration of a fortnight, in spite of the tough beef and black bread and potatoes, I was as well and as strong as I ever had been; and in proof of this, I started instanter for another shooting excursion in the interior."  Bang!

One of Alexander the Great's men--Onesicritus by name--wrote a fair description of Sri Lanka, which he called Taprobane.  That name is close to Tambapanni, which is the name appearing on Ashokan inscriptions in India at the same time.  Judging from the Sinhala epic the Mahavamsa, it was also the name used by the island's rulers, who had arrived a few centuries earlier from India.  The Romans knew the place, too, as Taprobane.  Pliny refers to it as such, and it wasn't all hearsay: in the first century a Roman arrived in Sri Lanka by sailing accident, and the result was a trip to Rome by four Sri Lankan ambassadors.  In the fourth century, however, there was a name change: a Sri Lankan ambassador arrived in Constantinople, where his country was soon called Seren Devi, meaning "country of the Sinhalas."  From this Byzantine usage, Arab writers called the island Serendib, from which English gets "serendipity,"  Crop the last syllable from Serendib and turn the "r" into an "l," and you have Ceylon, the English name through the colonial period.  The name Sri Lanka, adopted by the country as its official name in 1972, is only about a thousand years old: that's when the honorific Sri seems to have been first added to the ancient name Lanka, traditionally believed to be older than all the rest.  Lanka is also the name by which the island is known in the Ramayana.

Now you won't be so surprised to learn that the Mahavamsa, the Sinhalese epic from the fourth century B.C., says that Anuradhapura's western district was a Greek neighborhood. 

The city had just been established by Devanampiya, who ruled from 305 to 266 B.C.  He was a not-so-distant descendant of the Indian king Vijaya, the conqueror who had arrived on the island probably from Gujarat.  There had been a succession struggle after Vijaya, a rebel prince, seized power and ruled as Pandukabhaya.  Devanampiya was his grandson.  He was also a correspondent of Ashoka, the great Mauryan king in India.  Ashoka converted Devanampiya to Buddhism and sent two of his own children to Sri Lanka as lifelong missionaries.   For Anuradhapura, this meant the creation of the Mahavihara, the "great monastery" and the oldest of the three most important viharas whose ruins dominate Anuradhapura today.

Trinco, for short, is the great natural harbor on the east coast of Sri Lanka.  Were it not for civil war, it would also be a great port.  As it is, it's a quiet town, but not a peaceful one.

Compared to its northern cousin Anuradhapura, Polonnurawa was a historical blip--moreover, it was a blip created by outsiders, namely the Colas of South India. In 993 they conquered the Sinhalese kingdom at Anuradhapura and in 1017 created their own capital farther south, at Polonnuwara. The city was seized by the Sinhalese in 1070 under Prince Vijayabahu, however, and in the next century it had a great run under Parakrama Bahu and his successor Nissankamalla, who together built most of what is left today. The city was abandoned in mid-13th century and sat decaying in the dense forest until it was rediscovered in 1820 by a Lt. Fagan, who apart from presumably having his hair stand on end, wrote to his superiors about "this great monument of superstition...." The monuments were not only ruinous but overgrown when he cut his way into them. Since then, they have been heavily but not too heavy-handedly cleared and restored, and it is probably fair to say that they alone make Sri Lanka worth visiting even today, when Colombo and Kandy are traumatized by war and modernity.

Peradeniya is known abroad either as a world-class botanical garden or as Sri Lanka's once promising, now faded, national university; it's also a town, however, surrounded by a very distinctive rural landscape.  The pictures here begin with the garden but jump to that landscape.