Sri Lanka

• 1. Introduction

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  Sri Lanka sits at the southern tip of India, separated from the subcontinent by just a narrow channel of water. It is one of the most ancient inhabited places on Earth, with evidence of human settlement stretching back 125,000 years. The island has been a trading crossroads for Arab merchants, Portuguese soldiers, Dutch traders, and British colonisers. It has also been the stage for one of the longest civil wars in modern Asian history. How did a small island acquire so many names, so many rulers, and so many layers of identity? And how did a nation with the highest human development index in South Asia spiral into its worst economic crisis in living memory? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. Names and Meanings

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  Ceilão was the name Portuguese explorer Lourenço de Almeida wrote down when he arrived in 1505. That word was eventually transliterated into English as Ceylon. But the island had been called many other things long before the Portuguese appeared on the horizon. According to the Mahāvaṃsa, the legendary Prince Vijaya named it Tambapaṇṇĩ, meaning "copper-red hands" or "copper-red earth", after his followers' hands were stained by the red soil where they landed. Ancient Greek geographers called it Taprobanā or Taprobanē, drawn from that same word Tambapanni. Arab and Persian travellers knew it as Sarandīb, which is the origin of the English word "serendipity". The Tamil term Eelam was used in Sangam literature to designate the whole island. Under Chola rule it bore the name Mummudi Cholamandalam, meaning "realm of the three crowned Cholas". On the 7th of September 1978, the government fixed the country's formal name as the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. The word serendipity, born of a traveller's mispronunciation, quietly preserves the island's ancient identity in everyday English.

• 3. Before the Written Record

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  Pahiyangala, a cave site dated to around 37,000 years ago and named after the Chinese monk Faxian, is one of the most significant prehistoric settlements found on the island. Nearby caves at Batadombalena and Belilena have yielded remains of anatomically modern humans that archaeologists have named Balangoda Man. Those early inhabitants may have practised agriculture and kept domestic dogs for driving game. The earliest known living descendants of those settlers are the Vedda people, an indigenous group numbering approximately 2,500 in modern Sri Lanka. During the period from 1000 to 500 BCE, the island shared megalithic burial practices, iron technology, and farming techniques with southern India. These traditions spread alongside the movement of Dravidian clans such as the Velir. One of the first written references to the island appears in the Indian epic Ramayana, which describes a kingdom named Lanka created by the divine sculptor Vishvakarma for Kubera, the God of Wealth, before Kubera was overthrown by his rakshasa stepbrother Ravana.

• 4. The Buddhist Transformation

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  In 250 BCE, a bhikkhu named Mahinda, son of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka, arrived at Mihintale carrying the teachings of the Buddha. His mission converted the reigning monarch, Devanampiya Tissa, and Buddhism spread rapidly through the Sinhalese population from that moment forward. Five years later, in 245 BCE, bhikkhunī Sanghamitta arrived with the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi tree, said to be a sapling from the Bodhi Tree under which Gautama Buddha became enlightened. That tree is considered the oldest continuously documented human-planted tree in the world. The Fourth Theravāda Council was held at the Anuradhapura Maha Viharaya in 25 BCE, called because a terrible harvest had killed many monks who were responsible for holding the Pali Canon in memory. The surviving monks made a fateful decision: to write the oral teachings down on palm-leaf manuscripts. After the council, copies were carried to Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. Sri Lanka has maintained the longest unbroken history of Buddhism of any predominantly Buddhist nation. During periods when the tradition declined on the island, monks were sent from Burma to revive the monastic lineage.

• 5. Empires and the Fortress in the Sky

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  Anuradhapura served as the capital city for nearly 1,400 years after the kingdom was established in 380 BCE under the reign of Pandukabhaya. During this vast stretch of history, the Sinhala kingdom was invaded at least eight times by neighbouring South Indian dynasties including the Chola, Pandya, and Pallava. A particularly dramatic moment came in 205 BCE, when a Chola named Elara overthrew the ruling king and held the country for 44 years before being defeated by Dutugamunu. Sri Lanka was also the first Asian country known to have had a female ruler: Anula of Anuradhapura, who reigned from 47 to 42 BCE. Among the construction projects of this era stands Sigiriya, the so-called "Fortress in the Sky", built during the reign of Kashyapa I between 477 and 495. The rock fortress is encircled by ramparts and moats and enclosed gardens, ponds, pavilions, and palaces. The fall of the Anuradhapura kingdom came in 1017, when Rajendra I, son of the Chola emperor Rajaraja I, launched a large invasion, captured king Mahinda V, and sacked Anuradhapura. The capital was then moved to Polonnaruwa. Vijayabahu I reversed that conquest through a 17-year-long campaign, driving out the Chola by 1070 and reuniting the country for the first time in over a century.

• 6. Colonisation and the Kingdom of Kandy

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  Lourenço de Almeida, son of Francisco de Almeida, arrived in 1505, beginning the early modern period. By 1517 the Portuguese had built a fort at Colombo and were steadily extending control over the coastal areas. In 1592, Vimaladharmasuriya I moved his kingdom inland to Kandy, seeking a more defensible position. He brought the sacred Tooth Relic to Kandy in 1595 and built the Temple of the Tooth, making the city the new centre of Sinhalese royal and religious authority. During the reign of Rajasinha II, Dutch explorers arrived, and in 1638 the king signed a treaty with the Dutch East India Company to push out the Portuguese. The Dutch eventually won that contest, with Colombo falling to them by 1656. They then violated the 1638 treaty and retained the areas they had captured. The Burgher people, a distinct ethnic community, emerged from intermingling between Dutch settlers and native Sri Lankans during this period. British forces occupied the coastal areas in 1796, and on the 14th of February 1815, Kandy was taken in the Second Kandyan War. Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the last native monarch, was exiled to India. The Tooth Relic's journey from the south to Kandy in 1595, and the Temple built to house it, tied religious legitimacy to that highland city for centuries to come.

• 7. Independence and Civil Conflict

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  Independence was proclaimed on the 4th of February 1948, with D. S. Senanayake becoming the first Prime Minister of Ceylon. A free education system established in 1945 by C. W. W. Kannangara and A. Ratnayake had already begun reshaping the country. The early years of independence were marked by an ethnic fault line that deepened rapidly. In 1956, Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike introduced the Sinhala Only Act, recognising Sinhala as the only official language. The Federal Party, under S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, launched non-violent resistance campaigns against the bill. Bandaranaike was assassinated by an extremist Buddhist monk in 1959. His widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, became prime minister in 1960 and later the world's first elected female head of government. The assassination of Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiyappah in 1975 by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam marked a pivotal crisis point. Full civil war began in 1983, sparked when an LTTE attack on 13 soldiers triggered anti-Tamil riots that sent more than 150,000 Tamil civilians fleeing the island. The war lasted 26 years and killed between 60,000 and 100,000 people. On the 19th of May 2009, under the Presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Sri Lanka Armed Forces formally defeated the LTTE and re-established control over the entire country. A Norwegian-brokered ceasefire signed in 2002 had failed to hold, and four rounds of peace talks between 1985 and 2006 produced no lasting agreement.

• 8. Economic Crisis and Renewal

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  Economic troubles that began in 2019 combined several pressures: rapidly increasing foreign debt, massive government budget deficits following tax cuts, falling foreign remittances, and a food crisis partly caused by a nationwide ban on inorganic fertilisers imposed in June 2021. A senior lecturer at the University of Peradeniya, Jeevika Weerahewa, predicted that the fertiliser ban would reduce the paddy harvest in 2022 by an unprecedented 50%. The Sri Lankan government declared the ongoing crisis the worst in 73 years. By June 2022, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe declared the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy in parliament. The country defaulted on its $51 billion sovereign debt for the first time in its history. Power cuts ran approximately 15 hours a day, fuel was suspended to non-essential vehicles, and street protests erupted across the country. Protesters stormed the President's House on the 9th of July 2022. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to Singapore and emailed his resignation to parliament, becoming the first Sri Lankan president to resign mid-term. Ranil Wickremesinghe was then elected as the ninth President on the 20th of July 2022 by parliament and implemented economic reforms aimed at stabilisation. In September 2024, Anura Kumara Dissanayake was sworn in as president after winning a left-wing presidential campaign. His National People's Power alliance then won a two-thirds majority in parliamentary elections in November 2024. Tourism revenue had already begun recovering, reaching over $1.5 billion in the first half of 2024, a 78% increase year-on-year, suggesting the earliest signs of an economic floor.