This episode is dedicated to the party that lasted for 22 years.    

Now regarded as little more than ruins atop a rock that offers a magnificent view, Sigiriya is undoubtedly one of ancient Asia’s Seven Great Wonders; albeit one that wears its wonders with clandestine dignity.

Its moment of destruction coincides most neatly with the date most historians give for the ending of the ancient world itself – 500 CE, for just 5 years beforehand that 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 out lasted even Cleopatra’s Feast. The party was Gatsbyesque in its exuberant excess. More opulent than the Rothschild’s 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 last 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, Hittie, 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 greatest kings, as his heir, Moggallana would have looked forward to a reign of plenty after this father had chased the occupying Dravidian Tamils from the kingdom, and rebuilt the country, tank by tank, temple by temple. It was years of milk and honey (or Kittel) he had in mind – not penurious exile.

But it was not to be. His half-brother, Kashyapa played family politics with a cardsharp’s skills. He out manoeuvred his brother, and, with the help of the head of 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 Oedipean 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. Its like, anywhere in Aisia, 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 hermits 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 that mimicked 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 mathematic 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” being the Singhala 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 and he himself was so obsessed 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 full and real glory that underwrote Sigiriya was gradually discovered.  Central to it all was its reliance on the most advanced water technology in the world 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 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.

Exhibited here in Sigiriya are all the greatest advances the country made in developing technology and practices to empower the water that powered the state itself.  Climbing to the top will not reveal them; indeed most of it is still lost underground or in forest.  But it is there – traces of it, obvious 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 h...

Gods, Ghosts & and the faintest haunting of historical whispers of what was and - just about - still is, is the subject of this podcast, which delves beneath Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s eastern seaboard.    

Haunted might be too strong a word for Trincomalee – but by any measure the town like the country has more than its fairly allocated measure 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 that is little different now to 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 terrorizing prince descended from lions, the island’s very earliest creation myths feature a multitude of alarming divinities. Set beside them, the animist and ancestral sprits 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 it reputation with uttermost modesty, restrained as 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 around the western seaboard, the hill country, and 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 bring 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 untwenty 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 globally 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, 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 was to create a titillation of scandal back home for his serial marriage of 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 boosting 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 island’s Burgher community – descendants of Portuguese and sometimes Dutch men and local wo...

Books to escape with is the subject of today’s podcast.    

Stretched between the pleasure gardens of the bishops of London and the $300 million Fulham Football Club, once owned by the disgraced sexual predator Mohamed Al Fayed, Alphabet City is West London’s new Knightsbridge. From south to north, its streets are laid out with an intimidating, if inexact, alphabetical order. Its “exquisite array of Victorian and Edwardian homes,” claims its principal estate agent, “infuse the neighbourhood with a timeless architectural appeal.”

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 group 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 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 list of books that is long enough to keep you going for a good long time. A year at least. Time enough 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 of genres. But it will then upturn them with the most unexpected of settings, perspectives, voices, and approaches as if you’ve found a trove of mille-feuille in a Dunkin’ Doughnuts Drive Through.  

Suprise, 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 recent world as well as a picture of worlds to come – or even worlds that are framed forever in the most necessary of Forevers, like psychedelic carnivals or enchanted forests.

Needed they most certainly are. 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 presents the opportunity to slip out of this literary listlessness. Through, why, you may disputatiously ask; why Sri Lanka? Why not another other 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 creating such a wealth of world class literature as is Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka’s contemporary writers have burst like firecrackers over world fiction. 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 – all, 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 burn 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. Normally, 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, 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 all readers for its story 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 ...

The Search for Sri Lanka’s Demon Queen is the subject of this podcast, which unpicks with the very earliest stories and places associated with Sri Lanka’s first steps as a nation; and with two particular people: Kuveni and Vijaya.  

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 Aneas, 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 fond of boasting 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 exactingly clear why Kuveni, the lost queen of the isle of rubies, is the queen the country is too alarmed by to properly acknowledge.

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 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 half a day, is an important measure of how successful a holiday or tour goes, then it would be best to abandon the search for Kuvani immediately. 

For she is not, thankfully, 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, future; and give the muscles of your personal imagination an opportunity 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 is to miss the point. 

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

It is also – and much more importantly - fattened up, like old style Fois 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.  Viyaja, 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 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, 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 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 a great 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 alternative name for Kudiramalai and for centuries, amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, the ruins of 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 rema...

This episode is dedicated to uncovering Sri Lanka’s most celebrated sapphires.   

Whilst not everyone has access to a family tiara, you don’t need to be an oligarch, still less a duke to notice if one’s tiara needs an upgrade. 

The task of upgrading the crown 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 accelerate 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 symbolizes 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 back dated at least another 700 years. 

Twenty five percent of its total land area is gem-bearing, mostly around Ratnapura and, less fruitfully, Elahera. Thanks to the extreme old age of its rocks (90% are between 500 to 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous as to often just wash out onto flood plains, and into rivers and stream. 

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 of 5 to 500 feet in depth 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. 

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

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 stones to cutter-polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors, descendants of Arabians traders. The stones are then sold on to wholesalers and then retailers. And then to auctioneers who often resell the stones back to other consumers or 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 percent of the precious stones mined on the island are sapphires.

Blue as the morning, the ocean, the sky, sapphire, most contrarily, are also red, purple; pink, gold, and lavender – the colour variety being dependant on the stone’s chemical composition. 

Its green sapphires are addictively distinctive, but the island also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires, a yellow sapphire that 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, accessorises 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 like at the top of the British crown, surrounded by supplicant diamonds. Is it from Sri Lanka – or Afghanistan, India, or Burma? Most experts reckon on 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 to be seen on the hand of the current Princess of Wales, Catherine, is best categorised 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. It was later inherited by her elder son and at some point, between 2010 and 2011 was resized to fit...

This episode is dedicated to Sri Lanka’s best hotels.

What modest moral argument there ever is to pick out the best in anything is fatally undermined in this guide - for it presents merely my point of view.  No democratically elected jury is on hand to mediate and amend. The choices are, at worst, biased; at best, whimsical.  Nevertheless, it is my history of happiest stays that best explains these most likely contenders for the happy stays of others.

Of Sri Lanka’s 10,000+ places listed as offering accommodation, the greater majority are privately let villas and apartments, supplemented by homestays. Less than a quarter of its accommodation is classified as a hotel 2,500 in all. 

A third of these hotels are 4-star and less than 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 the 200 5-star hotels are small private operations that focus on providing authentic boutique experiences rather than long corridors of identical bedrooms. 

The hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world have yet to put in much of an appearance in Sri Lanka. Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory across the island, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality that can be evenly experienced in any of their branded hotels. 

Most hotel development has, of course, followed the tourists and so hugs the coastline from Negombo, near the airport, to Yala in the far south, with the greater number coalescing around Galle.

A much more modest sprinkling of other 5-star hotel dusts such locations as Kandy and the cultural triangle, with a few outstanding examples reaching out into the north and east. 

We start, as visitors rarely do, in Colombo, where 14 hotels jostle for attention, a mere handful of the many others, and the more being built now.

Affordable, comfortably tatty and very environmentally minded, The Colombo Court Hotel & Spa, is a much overlooked boutique hotel is within walking distance of many of Colombo’s nicest haunts. Sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road, it is a habitat of rare calm and tranquillity, its lush pool and rooftop bar among its many subtle delights. 

More noticeably boutique chic is Maniumpathy.  By checking in at the beautifully restored walawwa, you can pretend that you are anywhere but in a big city. Cool, quiet, and calm, the little hotel, despite having changed hands multiple times, is a great option for anyone wishing to replace big brand hotels with something on a much more human a scale.

For fine establishment boutique you can’t beat Tintagel. The graceful Colombo residence of the Bandaranaike families and scene of the assassination of S.W.R. Bandaranaike, Tintagel is now an impressive boutique hotel run by the Paradise Road designer and entrepreneur, Udayshanth Fernando. If sinking into unquestionable peace and luxury is your principal need, this is the place for you. 

At the other end, boutique casual you might say, is Uga Residence.  The landmark hotel in a small and growing local chain, Uga Residence is a 19th century mansion that has morphed delightfully into a lavish boutique hotel. Set like a delightful navel in the heart of the city, its bar offers an inexhaustible range of whiskeys.

Colombo’s most famous hotel, The Galle Face Hotel, has a Victorian era guest list that reads like Who’s Who of the time, this iconic hotel is the only one in Colombo that still enjoys direct sea access – though to bathe off its slim, rocky beach to invite prescient thoughts of mortality. It started life as a modest Dutch Guesthouse before the opening of the Suez Canal turned the tickle of eastward bound Europeans into a river. 

Continually enlarged and upgraded, most notably by Thomas Skinner in 1894, it became the city’s top luxury meeting point attracting an international A List. Gandhi, Noel Coward, Che Guevara, Yuri Gagarin, Nixon, Prince Philip, and Elizabeth Taylor all booked rooms. Vivien Leigh sulked in her bedroom, sent home in disgrace by her husband Laurence Olivier.

Little has changed since her repeated calls to room service: it is just as lovely, weathering a recent upgrade with rare, good taste. It is the best place to Wedding Watch as it hosts around one thousand society weddings a year. Enjoy them as you nibble Battenburg cakes on the terrace, sip Pimm’s and watch the Crow Man scare away the birds.

The Cinnamon Grand is the flagship hotel in a chain of Cinnamon Hotels, a stone’s throw from the President’s Office. Despite its corporate, blocky architecture, its secret weapon is its people. It makes a point of knowing who you actually are and what you really want. From lavish pools to flaky croissants, themed restaurants to battleship-large reception desks, it offers all you would hope for from a large, successful hotel. 

Still a beacon for cloistered modernity is Colombo’s Hilton Hotel.  Weathering a troubled birth, it was nevertheless one of the first globally branded hotels to wash up on Colombo’s then more parochial shores. It was finally launched in 1987, a year which, but for this, the country would choose not to dwell upon. Civil war raged, Jaffna was besieged and a serious of murderous race riots broke out. But to honour the hotel’s thirty years of indefatigably providing guests with all the best services of a major hotel (and one of the best brunches on offer in the city), a stamp and a first day cover were issued by the Sri Lanka Post in 2017. 

It new competitors however are giving it a run for its money.  

One of the milestones in Colombo’s journey from an overlooked and embattled post-Independence past into a more materialistically glamorous future was the creation of the high rise Shangri-La Hotel. 

Built by the Chinese as a sort of offshoot of their Belt-and-Braces mission, it overlooks the sea at Galle Face Green with half a dozen bars and restaurants, and lavish bedrooms well able to match the best in any other globally branded five star hotel. 

Just a stone’s throw away is China’s greater investment in the country - Colombo International Financial City, a 300 acre, $15 billion, special economic zone reclaimed from the sea which, the suits claim that will be a place that “fuzes the culture and energy of a nation with best international practice.” Whilst the exact meaning of this penetrating solipsism is hard to unpick, and the planned architecture so modernistically predictable as to make it tricky to know whether you are in Dubai, Shanghai, or London Docklands, Pricewaterhouse Cooper insists it will add almost twelve billion dollars to the country’s annual GDP.

And then there is the Taj Samudra.  One of the oldest luxury hotels in Colombo, the Taj was constructed before astonishing premiums was put on the capital’s sea facing land. It therefore enjoys a rare calming green skirt of lush gardens and wings that go out rather than up. Scion of the Taj India chain, it offers its guests everything they might hope for from a massive corporate hotel, including excellent restaurants (especially YUMI), a hair salon – and, hidde...

After the excesses of Prince Vijaya and Queen Annua, it is time to encounter our third candidate king and winner of an abiding place in the island’s register of wicked monarchs.

So little is actually known about Yassalalaka Tissa, King of Anuradhapura that he almost fails to make the cut. And yet three key qualifications mark him, two of which are so beautifully distinctive as to ensure his remembrance for as long as anyone ever bothers to remember the island’s ancient kings.

His path to power was so traditionally iniquitous that has become an almost essential distinction for any candidate for this guide: he murdered his predecessor. Simply by virtue of his ascension, Yassalalaka Tissa makes the grade, though the ancient sources helpfully validate this by calling him “a vicious ruler.”  

But by virtue of his placement in the line of the founding Vijayan kings, his inclusion here offers an irresistible and matchless neatness to the account. For he was to be the last true Viyayan ruler. His own murder, in 60 CE, just 8 years after seizing the throne, brought to an end the royal dynasty that, more than any other, set up the country to be what is was. 

And what an ending it was, its preposterous characteristics being the third main reason to include in this guide.

Yassalalaka Tissa own reign suffered from the fact that his dynasty had never really recovered from the effects of having overcome the island’s third invasion by Tamil warlords between 103 to 89 BCE. This was to so weaken the kingdom as to fatally undermine its confidence and capability.

It all started with yet another grubby and bloody power struggle that saw one brother kill another to grab the throne before passing it on – briefly – to yet another bother, Khallata Naga, who was himself to be despatched by a fourth, Valagamba, in 103 BCE. It was a damned succession. 

Barely had Valagamba digested the celebratory when all the hounds of hell slipped their leads and the kingdom’s preeminent port, Mahatittha (now Mantota, opposite Mannar) fell to invaders. 

The third Tamil invasion of Sri Lanka was on. Valagamba fled, lucky to be alive and in a 14-year tableau reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s novel “Five Little Pigs” the once grand Anuradhapura Kingdom was then manhandled to atrophy. 

Two of the Dravidians returned to India, leaving one of the remaining five, Pulahatta, to rule from 104-101 BCE. At this point, history struggles to keep up.

Pulahatta was killed by Bahiya, another of the five remaining Dravidians and head of the army, who was in turn murdered in 99 BCE by Panayamara, the third Dravidian who had been unwisely promoted to run the army. 

Proving those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it, Panayamara was assassinated in 92 BCE by his general, the fourth Dravidian, Pilayamara. 

But by now Valagamba, ever the comeback king, began his return, his guerrilla tactics toppling Pilayamara who had lasted all of seven months on the throne; and then defeating the last of the Pandyan chiefs, Dathika. 

Valagamba’s return to power should have seen in a long lasting and confident restart for the dynasty – but too much blood had been split, and regicide had been so normalized as to undermine nearly every succeeding monarch with its malign and cancerous weight.

Two periods over the next 130 years in particular were to be its undoing, the first being the chaos unleased by the ambitions of Queen Annua herself who murdered 7 kings before being murdered in her turn.  

Just 5 kings later chaos once again took hold, when a civil war, promoted by one too many serial regicides, caught up with a king called Kanirajanu Tissa who was to be despatched in 33 CE by his successor, Chulabhaya in time honoured fashion.  

Dead within 2 years, Chulabhaya’s sister, Sivali took the throne for 4 months before – but by now a proper civil war had struck up, with all its attendant disasters, including leaving they kingdom itself utterly ruleless for periods of time.

Sivali bobs up and down in the months succeeding her ascension vying for control of the state in what looks like a three cornered struggle between herself, her nephew Ilanaga and the Lambakarnas. For by now the Vijayan dynasty not only had itself to contend with – it also had the much put upon and exasperated nobility, especially the Lambakarna family.

Little about this period of Sri Lankan history is certain, except that from around 35 CE an uncensored civil war preoccupied the entire country, leaving it without any plausible governance. 

For a time Ilanaga seemed to be ahead of the pack. But he then seems to have scored a perfect own-goal when he demoted the entire Lambakarna clan. This abrupt change in their caste, in a country held increasingly rigid by ideas of caste, galvanised them into full scale rebellion. 

The king – if king he really was – fell and fled into the hill country, returning 3 years later at the head of a borrowed Chola army to take back his throne in 38 CE. Ilanaga’s reign lasted another 7 years, before his son Chandra Mukha Siva succeeded in 44 CE – only to be murdered by his brother, and our third candidate in this guide, Yassalalaka Thissa in 52 CE. 

The stage was now set for one of the most eccentric periods of island governance. With the ascension of the regicidal Yassalalaka Thissa, the last chorus of the Vijayan throne sounded, in Frank Sinatra style: “and now the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.”

With a story too bathetic to be encumbered by any inconvenient disbelief, The Mahavamsa recounts the bizarre end of this once great dynasty in 60 CE.

“Now a son of Datta the gate-watchman, named Subha, who was himself a gate-watchman, bore a close likeness to the king. And this palace-guard Subha did the king Yasalalaka, in jest, bedeck with the royal ornaments and place upon the throne and binding the guard's turban about his own head, and taking himself his place, staff in band, at the gate, he made merry over the ministers as they paid homage to Subha sitting on the throne. Thus, was he wont to do, from time to time.

Now one day the guard cried out to the king, who was laughing: `Why does this guard laugh in my presence?' And Subha the guard ordered to slay the king, and he himself reigned here six years under the name Subha Raja.”

Despatched by his own lookalike, Yassalalaka Thissa, the last Vijayan king died, one hopes, seeing the unexpectedly funny side of assassination. King Subha’s own reign lasted 6 years when, whetted by a 3 year rule back in 35 CE, the Lambakarna clan took royal matters back into their own hand and put the ex-palace guard to death.

Some 200 years after all this dayglow-mad tale, we encounter our 4th candidate; villainous for sure but oddly sweet too – though not so sweet as to rule himself out from his rightful place in this guide. 

By the time Jettha Tissa I came to the throne, the Lambakannas, the dynasty that replaced the Vijayans, were already 60% through their rule; though they were to regain power 245 years later and rule for a second term, this time for almost 300 years until the greatest Tamil invasion the island was to know eradicated their offspring from all known records...

The awful thing about wickedness is just how interesting it is. Kind and benevolent rulers; admirable warrior kings; even the fumbling but kindly nice ones who build hospitals and live blameless lives – they all pale into guilt-wrenching insignificance when set before a list saturated by the sinful, iniquitous, and depraved.

And in this respect, Sri Lanka is spoilt for choice, simply by virtue of its statistics. 

Around 200 kings, with the odd queen, ruled over the island from its first recorded beginnings in 543 BCE to its last king, packed off into exile by the invading British in 1815. From island wide kingdoms to ones circumscribed by covetous foreign occupiers, the 2358 years of royal rule the country enjoyed was a big dipper experience. It was just as Longfellow had once said of a little girl: “when she was good, she was very, very good/ But when she was bad, she was horrid.”

The country’s monarchs averaged little over 11 years a reign, but with massive variances. Most lapped up a rule of just a few years; sometimes only a few hours. 

A happy few enjoyed reigns that must have seemed an eternity to their fortitudinous subjects. Buit if the ancient chronicles are to be believed, almost half of them died well ahead of their divinely allocated time – at the hands of their own successors, often, sons, sometimes bothers, uncles or even wives or occasionally an invading Indian emperor or edgy Tamil warlord.

No known studies have been done to precisely identify which county can claim to be the most regicidally minded, but in any future list only a fool would put money on Sri Lanka not scoring somewhere around the top 5.

From this long bloody start, regicide took a modest back seat during the rule of the Dutch and the British. But things picked up after independence in 1948. Assassination, often but not always fostered by civil war, promoted the killing of a sitting president, a prime minister, and leading presidential candidate, Vijaya Kumaratunga, whilst another almost killed his own wife, the then president, Chandrika Kumaratunga in 1999.

It was but one of many other fortunately failed attempts at regicide that the independent republic had to face, a trait that reduced, at times, its own leaders to accusing one another of hatching yet more malodorously mortal plots.

But selecting just 6 of the country’s most egregious baddies – barely 7% of the total of potential scoundrels - is as difficult as selecting which chocolate to take from an Anton Berg’s Heart Box. The box has an impossibly delicious mix of pralines, marzipan, nougat, soft caramel, coconut, sea salt, orange, Chocolate Liqueur, Nut Truffle, hazelnut, cherry, and apricot. To make it to this list a Sri Lankan monarch had to be very bad indeed, a real and indisputable villein.

The list begins, quite neatly, with the county’s first recorded king. Embodying a prescient creation myth, which, like all many of their type, mix horror and achievement in as much equal measure as going into labour, Prince Vijaya fits the bill perfectly.

As Romulus and Remus had earlier demonstrated in faraway Rome, being a founding father often necessitated random acts of abomination and cruelty. And so it was with Prince Vijaya. Even his father heartily disapproved of him.

Coming from a royal Indian family said to have been descended from lions, psychologists might argue that the prince never had a chance. Violence was in his nature. 

But the Mahavamsa, the great ancient Chronicle of Sri Lanka that is rarely modest in praising anything remotely proto nationalistic, pulls no punches when it comes to its paterfamilias. Given its mission (“compiled for the serene joy and emotion of the pious,”) the Mahavamsa had little other choice but to call a spade a spade.

“Vijaya,” it begins, as it meant to go on, “was of evil conduct and his followers were even (like himself), and many intolerable deeds of violence were done by them. Angered by this the people told the matter to the king; the king, speaking persuasively to them, severely blamed his son. But all fell out again as before, the second and yet the third time; and the angered people said to the king: `Kill thy son.’”

For the king, this helpful request enabled him kill two birds with a single stone. He chose to rid himself of not just his own son, but of most of his kingdom’s rogues, whilst demonstrating, like the consummate politician he was, blameless clemency. The Mahavaṃsa records how “then did the king cause Vijaya and his followers, seven hundred men, to be shaven over half the head and put them on a ship and sent them forth upon the sea, and their wives and children also.” 

The problem was exported. The prince sailed away from India and “landed in Lanka, in the region called Tambapanni on the day that the Tathagata lay down between the two twinlike sala-trees to pass into nibbana.”

This time reference (“Tathagata”) to Lord Buddha non withstanding, the renegade prince wasted little time in smiting most of whom he first came across. His ruthlessness and expedient mindset can be seen at work in his marriage of Kuveni, a tribal princess, who was herself no stranger to brutality.

Piecing together what actually happened on his arrival is all but impossible but from the extravagantly violent tales told in the Mahavamsa it is likely that the vagabond prince found no empty island – but rather one already well stocked with people who had ordered themselves in tribes, perhaps even miniature kingdoms. To carve out his own domain necessitated fighting and in this a marital alliance with a local princess who could help him in the fight was invaluable.,  

In piecing together the ghostly DNA of Sri Lanka’s pre Vijayan native kingdoms, historians have had to turn to local folklore, Indian epic poems like the Ramayana and the Mahavaṃsa itself, but the picture they present is a blurred and fantastical image. 

There were the Ramayana, a half human tribe founded by the ten headed demon King, Ravana, whose followers have gone down in history as being a terrifying lot given to cannibalism. 

A further tribe, the serpent-like Naga, may exist only in myth, despite references to Lord Buddha arriving amount them to settle disputes. The Nittaewo, dark skinned, tiny, and understandably defensive, are a possible third tribal strand, their last members possibly smoked to death.

On marginally surer ground are the Yaksha, described by the Dipavaṃsa, the oldest of the island’s three ancient chronicles and which, with support from the later Mahavaṃsa, could possibly have given rise to the Vedda. 

Archaeogeneticists believe that the Vedda were descendants of the original Mesolithic settlers who migrated from India in prehistoric times 40,000 years ago. Scattered communities still exist today, an ever more ghostly presence on the island, their bloodlines dissipated by intermarriage. 

They worship a range of ancient folk deities as well as such mainstream Hindu gods as Murugan. Ancestor worship and the cult of the dead marks out many of their still just-living practices. 

This was Kuveni’s tribe, and they seemed to live in scattered communities of kingdoms in various parts of the island. Overcoming her first instinct to kill him, Kuveni instead married him and on their wedding, day helped hatch a plot to kill...

Encounters at the Jungle Hotel is a behind the scenes look at Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It starts, of course with a welcome. And a thanks, for coming our way, for most of the readers of this guide will no doubt be our guests.  

Whatever else is happening in the world, here at least there is a cake for tea; birdsong from dawn to dusk; and from everywhere the sound of civets, bickering monkeys that look a lot like Mr Trump; and squirrels bouncing on roofs like Keith Moon.

To have made it this far, your car will have managed our driveway of buffalo high grasses 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 we got 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, the Holy Roman Empire got itself 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 a 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 back.

The love restoration programme that followed often felt like the unravelling of Denisovan DNA. Expect the unexpected, said Oscar Wilde. Prescient advice in the jungle as much as in Victorian London. 

There were monks, of course. They arrived to be fed, to bless and leave, their umbrella bearers running behind them. 

And five or six builders, not dissimilar to Henry VIII’s wives: some jailed, some cherished. There was monsoon, 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, the 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, to become one of the island’s Top albeit tiny 5-star hotels.

Most hotels start their blubs with room details or menus. This one starts 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 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 Gaden 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, 33 endemic.  We have counted over 50 species here including, kites, eagles, peacocks, paraquets, owls, hor...

This episode is especially for visitors to The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel.  To borrow, at least a small part of Emma Lazarus’s famous poem: “Give me your tired, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free -" and we will do our best to help put things right, for it is a comfort to know that it is of little matter whether the glass is half full or half empty. Thankfully, the glass is refillable. And fill it we do at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.
 
 For should you want to do any restoring, resetting, rebooting or rebalancing of your mind or body, we are fortunate to have on hand five of the very best therapists in Kandy to help out. All can be booked in advance through the Hotel office to come to treat you here at the Hotel, either in your room or in Coco’s Pavillion, our therapy treatment centre built into a private amphitheatre with gorgeous views across the secluded jungle hills and valleys that surrounds the hotel.
 
 In particularly, we have exceptionally good physiotherapy, courtesy of Roshan Silva, our on-call and certified physiotherapist.
 
 Accredited by the Sri Lanka Foundation and the American Safety And Health Institute, Rohan works with many different types of clients, including athletes recovering from injuries. His work focuses on injury prevention, recovery and rehabilitation, and performance enhancement. One of his main clients is the Kandy Sports Club founded back in 1874 and today the leading multi discipline sports club in the country, known especially for its rugby.
 
 Rohan will begin the 60 minute session with a 5 minute consultation to identify any special areas of treatment that are necessary, previous treatments and specific vulnerabilities to be mindful of.
 
 The physiotherapy massage that lies at the heart of the session is done by hands-on treatment methods. It will first address pain, stiffness, muscular tension and any limited range of motion in the joints, muscles, and soft tissues.
 
 It will also focus on longer seated pains in the spine and joints, shoulders, knees, elbows that are typically caused by strains or injuries to the muscles and soft tissue; and by postural imbalances.
 
 The session may also include, as appropriate, two other classic therapies that are commonly used by trained physiotherapists:
 
 Dry Cupping, to help improve drainage for inflamed areas of the body by encouraging the better drainage of excess blood and water to away from inflamed areas.
 
 And K-Taping, to assist with musculoskeletal system damage by using thin, elastic tape to support muscles, joints, and tissues.
 
 The full session lasts 60 minutes but its shape can be determined in advance at the consultation – for Rohan is also experienced in determining and teaching exercises based on aerobics, and yoga to help further strengthen areas of vulnerability that you can practice regularly in your own time. If you would like to make time for him to determine and teach you a bespoke set of exercises to best suit your specific needs, this can be either added to an extended session or included within a shortened physiotherapy massage treatment.
 
 A more traditional island massage is also available courtesy of our two fully qualified Ayurveda masseuse: Udaya Rajapaksha; and Yamuna Jayawickrama. Both are trained in a full range of Ayurveda practices including Panchakarma and Abhyanga; as well as Reflexology; and have been practicing for over 14 years each.
 
 The classic ayurvedic abhyanga oil massage that they offer is focused on manipulating energy fields by applying itself more to the skin, rather than just to the underlying muscles. It helps detox the body, improve circulation, release muscle tension and reduce stress; and is especially good in nourishing the skin from head to toe as well.
 
 Unlike a sport massage which primarily kneads the muscles and skin, the ayurvedic abhyanga oil massage involves long, gliding strokes. It can also involve rhythmic tapping, using the fingers or hands, to stimulates nerve endings and rejuvenate the skin; quicker back-and-forth movements to generate heat and enhance blood flow; and specific pressure movements to target muscles and joints.
 
 Our fifth therapist is Noel Dharmajith – our on-call yoga teacher who for many years has run some of the most popular yoga classes in Kandy. He has been practicing yoga since he was eleven, training continually with yogic masters both in Sri Lanka and in India.
 
 The Hatha Yoga that Noel offers is the sort of workout that nurtures both body and soul, stretching and rebalancing the muscles as much as it de-stresses the mind. It is much loved for its mellow and measured pace. It gains its name for its unification of all that the sun (“Ha”) as well as the moon (“tha”) embodies - active and passive, warming and cooling. It dates back to ancient and later medieval Indian traditions.
 
 Two practices lie at its heart.
 
 The first, the Asana physical postures, comprise a set of exercises that build strength and enhance flexibility. Each posture is held for a while, giving you the space to connect with your breath and develop a deeper awareness of your body – whilst also stretching the muscles with finite care. The second, the Pranayama - or Breath Control – is the other central part of the therapy. By extending, slowing, or intensifying your breathing you become much more conscious of the energy within your body between exercises.
 
 Many practitioners of Hatha Yoga also follow four other routines; and these can be built into your yoga session with Noel if you would like to include them.
 
 The first of these are the Shatkarma Purification Techniques - six cleansing practices that seek to purify the internal organs and set the stage for more advanced yogic techniques.
 
 The second are the Mudras Energy Seals, the classic hand and finger gestures taught by Lord Buddha, that are believed to channel energy within the body.
 
 The third are the Bandhas Energy Locks - a set of internal muscle contractions that help to lock and redirect vital energy within the body.
 
 And the last is, of course, meditation, often done at the end or start of a session to quiet the mind.
 
 “What a long time whoever lives here is answering this door,” said Winne-the-Poo as he knocked on the door again. “But Pooh,” said Piglet, “it’s your own house!” “Oh!” Said Pooh. “So it is,” he said. “Well, let’s go in.” And so you can, body and mind returned to the sort of unruffled and tranquil stillness that holidays are, in part, all about finding once more.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

That was a production from The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel; and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka