The Sri Lanka Podcast: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka

In the previous 100 years, Sri Lanka’s little Vijayan kingdom twice risked absolute oblivion, courtesy of its carefree kings.

But twice too, in the following 170 years, the self-same state would step up and prosper beyond all expectations, thanks to two other kings, both innate masters of nation-building.  

For Pandu Kabhaya and his grandson, Devanampiya Tissa, were to set the mark way beyond what any other island leader might later hope to achieve and, in the rarified world of royal hustings, emerge as the nation’s two greatest monarchs by a country mile,

Like the prize ride in a fairground big dipper, that such a double-double whammy should even have happened is about as rare as throwing a dozen sixes in Monte Carlo. But little else should be expected of the Vijayans, the luckiest of all the dynasties, for whom every cloud had not one, but several, silver and gold linings. 

“The teeth of the dog that barks at the lucky man,” avowed a somewhat orthodontist-oriented Singhala folk saying, “will fall out”.  If true, then over the reigns of Pandu Kabhaya (437 - 367 BCE ) and Devanampiya Tissa (307 - 267 BCE), the island’s dogs would have been on a strict milk-and-roti diet to manage their missing molars better.

Over this period, the tiny Vijayan state was radically expanded, endowed with a magnificent capital city (Anuradhapura), distinct laws, civil and administrative infrastructure, investments in agriculture and water harvesting, increased trade, and a new language – the earliest inscriptions in Sinhalese date from close to this period. 

And, most critically of all, a new religion – Buddhism.  The subtle and profound chemistry between these manifold factors was to combine to create, like the rarest of new life in a petri dish, not just the world’s only Singhala state, but one that would still be flourishing, despite all manner of catastrophes encountered along the way, today.

Pandu Kabhaya’s (improbably long) 70-year reign (437 to 367 BCE ) would have come as a blessed relief to family and subjects alike after so much earlier dynastic squabbling. 

Having outsmarted, outmanoeuvred, foiled, defeated, imprisoned, and killed nearly all his troublesome uncles, he took up his place as victorious head of the fledgling Vijayan dynasty and set in train the real beginnings of the Anuradhapura Kingdom when he made his home in the future capital and, in Louis XIV-style, began building.

By then, the site of Anuradhapura was already over 200 years old and covered more than 20 acres. Pandu Kabhaya took it to still greater heights for what followed was, to paraphrase Deborah Kerr and Carey Grant many centuries later, "the nearest thing to heaven".

In all areas of enterprise - from farming and engineering to administration and construction, his rule harnessed the best available expertise to build a capital with the hugest of hearts, and through it, dominate an entire island. In the style of the much later and far away William the Conqueror and Doomsday Book, this king too commissioned a massive survey to take full stock of his domain, all the better to tax and manage it, plan investments, patronage, defence and yet further ascendancy.   

A later medieval record from just one location – Kurunegala – states that the king formed 1,000 new villages in the area, and that his grandson later dispatched pedigree Indian buffaloes to graze there.  Even allowing for the exaggeration of breathless flunkies, even knocking one zero off the total, it still amounts to colossal development.  Some thirty men were appointed in this area alone to be at the king’s specific executive command, overseen by one Alakeswara Mudiyanse, a man whose name alone has survived these many hundreds of years.

From Anuradhapura right across the Rajarata – the King’s country – and quite probably beyond, the royal writ ran.

It encompassed old settlements and new ones, exacting political and social domination that would have placed the kingdom at the apogee of the other competing island societies that co-existed with it, for a time at least, especially to the east and south.

In what was most probably something of a first for the Vijayan state, Pandu Kabhaya’s rule respected his Vedda allies, the Yakkhas, Cittaraja and Kalavela, clans of the island’s earliest original inhabitants. They had, after all, most likely been keen and critical allies in his fight against his many uncles.  

Now was the time for a reward.  The Mahavamsa records his beneficial diligence: “He settled the Yakkha Kalavela on the east side of the city, the Yakkha Cittaraja at the lower end of the Abhayatank…and on festival-days he sat with Cittaraja beside him on a seat of equal height, and having gods and men to dance before him, the king took his pleasure, in joyous and merry wise.”

Few areas of urban development escaped his planners’ eyes and The Mahavamsa elaborates that “he laid out four suburbs as well as the Abhaya-tank, the common cemetery, the place of execution, and the chapel of the Queens of the West, the banyan-tree of Vessavana and the Palmyra-palm of the Demon of Maladies, the ground set apart for the Yonas and the house of the Great Sacrifice”.

Cities need public servants – and here too Pandu Kabhaya seems to have missed nothing: “he set 500 candalas [low caste workers] to the work of cleaning the town, 200 candalas to the work of cleaning the sewers, 150 candalas he employed to bear the dead and as many candalas to be watchers in the cemetery.

And public servants, however low caste, needed homes: “For these he built a village north-west of the cemetery, and they continually carried out their duty as it was appointed. Toward the north-east of the Candala village, he made a cemetery, called the Lower Cemetery, for the Candala folk. North of this cemetery, between it and the Pasana-mountain, the line of huts for the huntsmen were built thenceforth.”

God, too, in his many different iterations, was also provided for.  “Northward from thence, as far as the Gamani-tank, a hermitage was made for many ascetics; eastward of that same cemetery, the ruler built a house for the Nigantha Jotiya. In that same region dwelt the nigantha named Giri, along with many ascetics of various heretical sects. 

And there, the lord of the land also built a chapel for the Nigantha Kumbhanda. Toward the west from thence and eastward of the street of the huntsmen lived five hundred families of heretical beliefs. “

Trade thrived exponentially, and there are even intriguing hints, documented in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, of a small group of Greek merchants who later lived in the royal city itself. Nor did he neglect the utilitarian, and, in a marvellous feat of ancient engineering, constructed the first bisokotuwas to regulate the outflow of water from tanks and sluices and to secure them against destruction during the annual floods.

Even health care was provided for.  “On the further side of Jotiya’s house and on this side of the Gamani tank, he likewise built a monastery for wandering mendicant monks, and a dwelling for the ajivakas and a residence for the brahmans, and in this place and that he built a lying-in shelter and a hall for those recovering from sickness.”

“Ten years after his consecration,” concludes The Mahavamsa, never ...

Good advice is often nearer to hand than even the most foolish leader can imagine.  Or be minded to seek.

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...

If ever there was a king who was entitled to get very cross indeed, it was Dutugemunu, one of the island’s standout sovereigns.  

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...

Far into the north of Sri Lanka, forty kilometres from Anuradhapura to the south, and fifty more to the western seaboard, lie the ruins of a shrivelled reservoir - Kuda Vilach Chiya. 

The tank is close to some of the country’s most iconic and mythical sites, including the landing place of Prince Vijay, paterfamilias of the nation, the palace of his forsaken native queen, and the country’s first recorded Singhala kingdom.

Kuda Vilach Chiya sits on the eastern edge of what is now Wilpattu National Park. Reaching the spot is no easy matter, since it lies within a deep, entangled jungle, for which special permission must be granted to gain access. Even after that, it requires a tractor to get you any closer to the site, followed by a lengthy journey on foot. For countless centuries, this has been leopard country.

Wilpattu’s vast 130,000-hectare wilderness is one of the island’s best kept wildlife secrets, so well off the tourist trail as to exponentially nurture its hundreds of rare species of fauna and flora - along with many endemic species: the Toque and Purple-faced Leaf Monkeys, Golden Palm Cat, Mouse Deer, Dwarf Toads, Hour-Glass Tree and Wood Frogs, Ceylon Jungle Fowl and Ceylon Grey Hornbill.  

Even the ultra-rare Sloth bear can be seen here, attracted by the sweet golden fruit of the Palu Tree.

But despite all these exceptional features, it is for its water that Wilpattu matters most.  Its name is more literally translated as the “land of Villu,” “villu” meaning “lakes.”  The whole area is pockmarked with shallow rainwater lakes.  But the lakes are eclipsed by Kuda Vilach Chiya, a much more deliberate water feature that is hard to make much sense of at first.  

Today, it amounts to little more than a long, two-to-three-kilometre embankment overgrown with trees and grasses, breached in many places by migrating elephants.  It is all that remains of the extraordinary man-made lake that was constructed here sometime after 67 BCE by the first Lambakanna king, Vasabha. 

Hardier survivors from that time are two masterpieces of ancient aqua engineering, the creation of which allowed Sri Lanka’s builders to construct astonishingly vast water reservoirs.  These in turn would propel the 500-year-old kingdom into the political stratosphere. 

The constructions – Bisokotuwas – allowed water to exit a reservoir without placing excessive pressure on the dam embankment, thereby preventing it from collapsing. 

As a result, the size of the reservoir could scale to unprecedented levels, water in unimaginably enormous quantities could be collected to extend agriculture, support ever larger and more urban populations, and produce crops whose surplus would rapidly and exponentially enrich the young state.

The Bisokotuwas at Kuda Vilach Chiya are precision-made structures; the stone slabs used on the inner face fit so perfectly together that there is no room for even the smallest weed to grow. 

Rising above it, the sluice tower itself can still be seen, part of the same remarkable lost laboratory of water. 

The same Lambakanna king, Vasabha, is also credited with the construction of the Mahavilach Chiya Wewa, a tank barely five kilometres from Kuda Vilach Chiya, with a storage capacity of 2,400 acres, which is still a key part of modern Sri Lanka’s water infrastructure. 

Quite why two such large tanks were built so close to one another is a mystery. But their very existence, and that of the Bisokotuwas that made them possible, is the point that matters most.

The area around Kuda Vilach Chiya, though remote even by Sri Lankan standards, has been shaped by multiple significant historical events. 

Not for nothing was it chosen for its capacious reservoirs. It was once a place of some importance. Ten thousand years earlier, and thirty kilometres north, are hypnotic Neolithic cave paintings at Tantirimale. 

Two hundred or so years earlier, the local temple, Thanthirimale Rajamaha Viharaya, marks the spot where the sacred Bo tree rested as it travelled to Anuradhapura from India under the protection of the Indian Emperor Ashoka’s daughter, Sangamitta. 

Some historians even believe that the site was once home to the lost kingdom of Panduvasdewu Nuwara, the early Vijayan realm that most immediately predated Anuradhapura itself. 

A monastery lies on the same site, its excavated gardens littered with stone containers carved to hold gems, and the statues of gods and lions, ruined when the country’s last unitary kingdom fell to invaders in 1215 CE. 

And in the nearby jungle, ancient monastic caves crouch, decorated with a script that predated Buddhism itself – Brahmi. 

All around it stretch the flat and softly undulating lands of the country’s massive Dry Zone. Much of Sri Lanka is very dry - as if the land itself had been bled white and hung out to dry. It is not perennially wet like Bangladesh. 

This is especially true of the Rajarata, the land most immediately around Anuradhapura - stretching from Jaffna and Trincomalee to Puttalam and Kandy - that lay, like Kuda Vilachchiya itself, solidly within the king's control. 

To achieve anything more than a rudimentary agricultural existence required the availability of year-long water, and plenty of it. 

Water, after all, permitted greater areas to be used for growing crops and higher yield densities. 

It meant food surplus, profit, trade - and with it the capacity to develop an urban and industrial capability, underwritten by technical advances from construction and weaponry to horticulture, and transport. It meant that the state could better develop the organisational and professional skills essential to its success – commerce, industry, engineering, labour, planning, law, medicine, food storage, and finance. 

Water management and irrigation, water storage and collection, water distribution – all this was what made the Anuradhapuran Kingdom possible in the first place. A defendable island state it may have been, and a centralised Buddhist one at that, but without water it could go nowhere, do nothing, be nothing.

This focus on water technology was not a new preoccupation introduced by the first Lambakarnas in 67 BCE. Still, they, more than any other dynasty, ensured the rapid development of the resources and technologies that provided their domain with year-long water.

The scattered Vedda and other pre-Sinhalese populations of the island had mastered the construction of small tanks before the fifth century BCE, and, with it, limited forms of agricultural production. 

This was the start of what is now known as the Tank Cascade system. Rainwater was collected in shallow ponds, and crude distribution methods were used to dispense it. 

This quickly developed into the construction of low embankments across valleys to dam small rivers or rivulets that would deposit their water into a series of downstream tanks, and, ultimately, paddy fields. Large seasonal rivers were next targeted with dams and distribution channels. 

Soon enough, a profoundly detailed understanding of how to refine and improve t...

Often, it seems, history hits you like an unyielding celebrity, all dressed up, very loud and awfully important.  Even though, for the most part, it is much more like a recluse, willing to surrender but the barest of hints as to its very existence.  

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.

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Two periods of state-sponsored homicidal self-indulgence were now to grip the kingdom.  

The first killings broke out in 195 CE, and the second in 248 CE.  Both were leavened by brief moments of stability that, with seconds to spare, prevented the country from collapsing altogether and gave it a modest but life-affirming breathing space. 

Such pirouetting on political tightropes was hardly a novelty. The Vijayans, the previous dynasty, had indulged in much the same – fuelling at least four periods of regicide covering several decades and prompting at least two civil wars over six hundred plus years of dynastic reign. 

To this, the Lambakannas added these two more, bringing the total number of regicide bacchanalia to at least six since Prince Vijaya had first set foot on the island back in 543 BCE. It is doubtful whether any other contemporary kingdom on the planet showed such record-breaking prowess.  Few, if any, that came later would have dynasties that possessed such a complete set of dark skills as to trump this dubious achievement.

This particular lethal phase was, in retrospect, modest by the standards of what was to follow.  But this is not to detract from its disruptive consequences, nor its mystery. 

Over two years, three kings were to occupy the throne in a succession swifter even than a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers foxtrot.  

On Kanittha Tissa’s death in 193 CE, his son, Cula Naga, assumed power, only to be assassinated by his brother Kuda Naga in 195 CE. Kuda Naga was then dispatched to the uncertain fields of reincarnation when his own brother-in-law, Siri Naga I, had him killed in 195 CE. 

The only hint to help explain what might have promoted all this, mere family politics aside, is a famine mentioned in The Mahavamsa: “so small a quantity of food were the people reduced in that famine,” it notes, referring to the brief reign of Kuda Naga, when, it said, “the king maintained without interruption a great almsgiving”.  

Famine is no friend of political stability, and if it was the cause behind Cula Naga’s murder, the latter food banks set up by his brother Kuda Naga were insufficient to calm the situation. 

There is no corroborating archaeological evidence to help us understand this dismal and murky period of national madness, though such evidence exists for other periods. 

Stone inscriptions, for example, carry an unusually high degree of importance in Sri Lanka, where the climate quickly destroys any organic material used to record events. 

And, unlike other sources, they have better weathered the repeated theft and destruction carried out on the country by its many occupiers - be they Tamil or European. 

But of the four thousand stone inscriptions discovered in Sri Lanka, only one and a half thousand have been adequately recorded and preserved.  Written in Sinhala, Tamil, Brahmi, Pali, and even Chinese, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, they most typically record donations to temples, the rules governing the maintenance of religious places, the establishment of tanks, and how local officials should administer water resources. 

But so far, none of them has been of any help in understanding this particular period of Sri Lankan history.  This may change as many more inscriptions indubitably await discovery.  

In 2023, for example, the most significant stone inscription ever found on the island was uncovered in Polonnaruwa, measuring forty-five feet in length and eighteen feet in height.  But none found and deciphered so far have helped us with this period as the second century CE slipped, blood-drenched, into the third.

Buildings tell the story of the times, but no buildings or even repairs of any significance can be dated to this precise period. 

Coins also help validate the historical record, and some of the island’s coins date back to the third century BCE. Their symbols, dates, the metal they are made of, the craftsmanship, and the place where they were found – all tell their own stories, but very few date from this very early period of Sri Lankan history. 

And those that do exist suffer from poor cataloguing and storage - and a great deal of theft, including a record heist involving over one thousand silver punch-marked coins dating back two thousand years held in the custody of the Archaeology Department; and of which now only sixteen coins remain. 

Pottery is also an essential voice in the historical record. Many shards of marked pottery have been excavated, most engraved with but two or three characters. 

But the joined-up study of ceramic inscriptions is a journey that academics have yet to undertake in its entirety, despite the earliest example of such artefacts in South Asia being found in Sri Lanka, on a pottery shard dating back to the fourth century BCE in Anuradhapura.

Nor is there anything in the country’s surviving Ola Leaf books to help contextualise this period. 

These books were written on the leaves of Palmyrah Palms that had been carefully processed - like paper. It is thought that over 75,000 such books exist, written in Sinhalese, but most date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and although some record earlier texts, nothing of consequence records this period of history. 

In fact, only four Ola Leaf books from a much earlier period have survived, dating back just over five hundred years; and the most important of them are kept in the National Museum of Colombo, Peradeniya University, the British National Museum, and the Paris National Museum.

Here was an unfinished whodunnit in which the author had time to chuck in plenty of bodies but ran out of time to add the clues.

Not even the combined forces of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot would be able to explain the who and why of these brutal Lambakanna years. 

Conjecture, built on the flimsiest of evidence, is therefore all we have for this time. But one conclusion is inescapable – that after so long a period of steady rule, one hundred and twenty-six years, during which the kingdom had been painstakingly rebuilt after decades of Vijayan regicidal induced disintegration, it must have dealt a shocking correction and reminder to the country: how easily are the good times squandered. 

However, by 195 CE, with Kuda Naga murdered and his brother-in-law, Siri Naga I, on the throne, a fifty-year salvage space opened out for the realm, the game of thrones having been temporarily closed down.  

Family politics took a backseat to good governance. 

For Siri Naga, however bleak the past few years had been for the kingdom, it was now time for some healing.  

The king, as religiously minded as the best, earmarked a massive chunk of state revenue for religion, starting with predictable piety, in this area.

Reigning for 20 years, he found time and resources to make good some of Anuradhapura’s most celebrated sacred buildings - the great stupa of Ruwanweliseya, said to house more of Lord Buddha’s relics than anywhere else in the world; a fine new set of stone steps leading to the sacred Bo tree itself...

It is unnecessary to employ the mind reading capabilities of Descartes or The Amazing Kreskin to discern how Sri Lanka might have reacted to Gotabhaya taking the throne in 253 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 ...

It took 128 years for the last Vijayan kings to travel the final road to oblivion, years that made the mafia tales of the Prohibition era or a Shakespearean tragedy seem tame.  

But travel them they did – and with unforgettable horror – all eighteen monarchs, of whom at least two-thirds were murdered by their successors, plunging the country into yet another civil war.

It all started with Mahakuli Mahatissa’s heir, a succession which, on the face of it, seemed to go to plan. His stepbrother, Choura Naga, the son of King Valagamba, took the throne in 62 BCE and married Anula.

The kingdom, rescued from its third Tamil invasion by Valagamba in 89 BCE, had enjoyed almost thirty years of peace, and maybe even some nation rebuilding by the time Choura Naga and his new wife enjoyed their marriage’s poruwa ceremony, witnessing the Ashtaka recite his religious chants at precisely the pre-ordained auspicious time.  

As events were later to prove, the Ashtaka was to have his work cut out for him over the next few years, becoming so in demand that he became a nationwide celebrity in his own right.  Anula would turn out to be one of the island’s more colourful characters; the kind of person Anne Tyler had in mind in “Back When We Were Grownups,” writing “once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”  

What little is known of King Choura Naga is that he managed to get himself poisoned by Anula in 50 BCE, an act of realpolitik in which his wife quite probably played on her husband’s deep unpopularity with the traditional Theravada Buddhist monks who dominated the country.  

This was not a school of Buddhism that won Choura Naga’s devotion. Indeed, he even went so far as to destroy eighteen of their temples, earning the eternal disapprobation of The Mahavaṃsa, who recorded the poisoning with great satisfaction: “the evildoer died and was reborn in the Lokantarika-hell.”

The political support Anula’s coup enjoyed is lost to all but the most pernicious speculation. Still, she filled the vacancy she had created by placing Choura Naga’s young nephew, Kuda Thissa, on the throne. But not for long. 

Anula was ever a lady short of patience. Tiring of her ward, she poisoned him in 47 BCE and installed her lover, a palace guard, as Siva I.  It was the start of the Love Period in ancient Sri Lankan history, every bit as deadly as a cobra bite.

Long-term love was not to be the hapless Siva’s destiny.  He, too, was poisoned, and the queen installed a new lover, Vatuka, on the throne in 46 BCE.  This was something of a promotion for the Tamil, who had till then been living the blameless life of a carpenter. 

By now, Anula was well into her stride. The following year, the carpenter was replaced in a similar fashion by Darubhatika Tissa, a wood carrier, who also failed to measure up.

Her last throw of the love dice was Niliya, a palace priest whom she installed as king in 44 BCE before feeding him something he ought not to have eaten. At this point, Anula must have reached the logical conclusion: if you want something done well, do it yourself. Busy women, after all, don't have time for excuses, only solutions.

And so, from 43 to 42 BCE, Anula ruled in her own name, Asia’s first female head of state, beating President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga by two thousand and thirty-six years.  It was not a success.  

After just four months, her group-breaking reign ended at the hands of her brother-in-law, Kutakanna Tissa, who, having sensibly become a Buddhist monk during Anula’s reign, remained alive and so able to rescue the monarchy.  

He did so by burning the queen alive in her own palace in 42 BCE, bringing down the curtains on a royal career that eclipsed that of the entire Borgia clan put together.

As the queen’s palace burned to ash, a commendably clockwork form of royal leadership took the place of palace coups.  For sixty-three halcyon years, son succeeded father or brother, brother, for three generations, giving the kingdom a modicum of time to recover, repair and heal.

For eighteen blissfully uneventful years, Kutakanna Tissa ruled with monkish devotion, adding to the many religious buildings in Anuradhapura, including, with a filial devotion that contrasted strongly with the previous regime, the Dantageha Nunnery for his mother, who had become a nun. 

He built a new palace and park for himself and, remarkably, also made time to restore and extend the kingdom’s basic infrastructure.  New walls, “seven cubits high”, and moats were built around Anuradhapura; two large reservoirs were established – Ambadugga and Bhayolippala.

Not the merest whiff of homicide hangs over Kutakanna Tissa’s death, and he was succeeded by his son, Bhathika Abhaya, in 20 BCE. 

The new king was to go down in history as one of the most religiously devoted monarchs the island had seen, no easy task given the stiff competition from those of his predecessors who had chosen virtue over assassinations.  

Religious buildings were made even more magnificent, to the point of being replastered with a unique mortar that included a variety of sweet-smelling plants and pearls.

New religious festivals and ceremonies were added to an already groaning ecclesiastical calendar and, for this most olfactory of monarchs, even the temple floors were ordered to be strewed with “honeycombs, with perfumes, with vases (filled with flowers), and with essences, with auri-pigment (prepared) as unguent and minium; with lotus-flowers arrayed in minium that lay ankle-deep”.

Needless to say, the death of this “pious ruler of the earth” was a matter of deep regret to The Mahavamsa. Most unusually, his beatific statue still stands - opposite the Ruwanweli Stupa, built by the ancestor to whom he owed so much – Dutugemunu.

The King was succeeded by his younger brother Mahadatika Mahanaga in 9 CE, a king almost as pious, famed for his enthusiastic temple building and the land donations he made to monasteries.  

As with many, if not all, of the Vijayan kings, his wife was Tamil, and both their sons were destined to become kings. But with them, the family reputation for dynastic devotion was to break down, giving way to something more in the spirit of Cain and Abel.

In waving a sorrowful farewell to his reign in 21 CE, The Mahavamsa obliquely notes a world soon to be forever shattered: “thus men of good understanding, who have conquered pride and indolence, and have freed themselves from the attachment to lust, when they have attained to great power, without working harm to the people, delighting in deeds of merit, rejoicing in faith, do many and various pious works.”

Amandagamani Abhaya succeeded his father, Mahadatika, with exemplary order and propriety.  A man almost as pious as his father, he continued the royal tradition of gilding the religious lily. He made a name for himself amongst vegetarians by banning all animal slaughter.

It was, with hindsight, inevitable that a man so totally out of touch with everyday life, still less the practical needs of his nation, should end up being killed by his own brother just nine years into his reign.