Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

Reservoir, tree, stupas.  All came before this, ancient Sri Lanka’s fourth great wonder  - a palace built to escape death and suffering. Built by the self-same great king, Dutugamunu, who commissioned the Ruwanweliseya, the oldest of Aurnadupura’s three great stupas, the Brazen Palace, or Lowamahapaya, was built between 161 BC to 137 BC.  Its name “brazen” comes from the brass or copper roof tiles that covered it. For centuries this was the island’s most magnificent building. The king had his architects draw up no-limit plans for an opulent palace monastery, two hundred feet long, rising up nine stories and a further two hundred feet, each story punctured by a hundred windows. Observers spoke of the entire edifice containing a thousand rooms – an obvious exaggeration, but one that was not really required. For the building was, by any standards anywhere in the ancient world, a masterpiece.  Inside the vast structure golden pillars held up the roof of a special throne hall, its centerpiece an ivory throne centred between the titanic images of a golden sun; and a moon and stars picked out in silver and pearls. The gilded roof glinted so fiercely in the sunlight that it could be seen from miles away. No expense was spared in its furnishings either. Even the water basins positioned for the washing of feet and hands at its entrance were said to be of gold.  Each floor of the building was given over for the use of monks in varying stages of sanctification as they travelled the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. Naturally, the lowest floor, the Buddhist equivalent of Perfumes & Make Up in a Department Store, was reserved for those who had yet to achieve anything. If not quite the habitat of the hoi polloi, it was not that far off either.  The second floor, however, was allocated for those who had mastered the Tripitaka – three texts in the Buddhist Pali Canon, mostly concerned with doctrinal requirements and monastic rules. It was only on reaching the third floor of this extraordinary structure that you could encounter monks who had made a real step change, for these ones had attained Sotapatti, the first stage of sanctification – an achievement made possible by having trounced indecision and an obsession with individuality, and rituals.  The fourth floor was populated by monks who had added to this achievement by making serious inroads to eradicate all tendencies towards ill-will. And, more importantly, any thoughts of sensuality. On the fifth floor lived the Anagamin monks – those who were now seeking to overcome pride, restlessness, ignorance, fine things, and immaterial cravings in order to become an arhat. And above them all, in the upper stories of this temple of gold, lived the Arahats themselves. This lofty station, the goal of all practicing Buddhists, was reserved for those who have finally achieved Nirvana. Not for them the irksome and interminable cycle of rebirth. Despite the building burning down, it was faithfully rebuilt in all its brilliance by King Saddha Tissa, Dutugemunu’s brother. Further repairs were carried out a hundred and twenty years later and a pavilion decorated with gemstones was added. But by the time of King Siri Naga I, sometime after 195 CE, the repairs carried out on this and other buildings in Anuradhapura were noticeably more modest in their goals.  Buildings such as this one, were made good, but reduced in size and scope, the easier for maintaining perhaps – or maybe because there was just insufficient money to keep them as they had been first envisioned. It was, in its own grey and mildly dispiriting way, a metaphor for its time. Today you need a rich imagination and a keen sense of history to imagine how the Brazen Palace would have looked – even in Siri Naga I’s time. Destroyed eight hundred years later in the tenth century by Tamil invaders, it is today reduced to one thousand six hundred granite columns set in forty rows – all that survives of its once colossal walls.  As Shelley might have said had he added Sri Lanka to his well-documented French, Swiss, German, Dutch, and Irish holidays: “nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,” stretch yet more ruins, scrub, and jungle. Sri Lanka’s fifth great wonder is a mystery. Perishable, yet still found in almost every island household at some point in any week, its origins may be obscure, but historians appear to agree on one thing: it is uniquely Sri Lanka, originating here at some very distant point in the remote past before being adopted in many other parts of South Asia, and even further afield.   Uniquely, it is also a wonder that can be constructed by almost anyone who knows how to boil rice. The recipe is simple. Once boiled, you add coconut milk to the rice for 5 more minutes of cooking until no liquid is left. Then slice it into shapes – diamonds are a favourite - and leave it to cool and dry a little more.  Kiribath, the name of the dish, is the ultimate comfort food. And yet like Dior’s little black dress, is immensely versatile too. It can be served with anything: poached eggs, Fois gras, curry, marmalade - but by far the best consumable accessory is Seeni Sambol, a sweet, tangy, caramelized onion flavoured with all the spices for which the island is so famous - tamarind, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, curry and pandan leaves, chilli and turmeric.  Most, if not all the food made on ther island, can be found elsewhere: in India of course, but also the Maldives, Malaysia, the Arab world, Portugal, Holland, and Britain. These shared dishes have, over the centuries, evolved to become distinctly Sri Lankan but only kiribath seems to have started its world journey from this island.  It is also the only food item to have inspired a stupa – the Kiribath Vehera in Anuradhapura, a small, barely standing and much overlooked stupa of almost unimaginable antiquity that once was said to house the sacred tooth relic itself, whose own origins, like the dish itself are equally opaque.  Yet kiribath’s very existence signifies several fundamental things about Sri Lanka that reach far further than mere corporeal cravings.  Like so many other Asian countries, rice is the country’s staple food, more so even than bread in the west. Sri Lanka devours over 2.4 million metric tons of it annually.  A semi aquatic plant, rice needs water to grow – around 2,500 litres of it for every kilo of harvested rice. Had ancient Sri Lanka rested on the calibre of those distant aquatic laurels that gave rise to Panda Wewa in the 4th century BCE, the country would have evolved little further than a few modest kingships. To grow the vast amounts of rice that were needed then, as now, huge advances in water technology were needed.  And these are best epitomised by bisokotuwas – cutting edge sluices, their design and position modified and perfected by the kingdom’s hydrogeological engineers, the Quantum Computing scientists of their day.  Their revolutionary innovations were far in advance of anything anywhere else in the world; and ensured that water could exit a reservoir without putting so much pressure on the dam embankment that it would collapse. But at scale – for this was the breakthrough.  The new sluice designs green lit the possible size of reservoirs, allowing them t...

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...

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 a walk down the secretive streets of Kandy.   Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in useful and functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes, struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; and what is most especially worth seeing: and why. Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is greatly regarded by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s true and real soul. Its heart. This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record in having withstood wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning.  But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, administrators, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea. No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods shipped by the colonists from the island – but given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was big. Very big. And, and the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.” As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out, a Sinhalese citadel, offering its shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years that it was occupied by the British. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly important. It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that could be bettered by donkeys. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention; for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords; and the unfulfilled promises of passing politicians. Nor is it mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few - though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall built to an almost inoffensive architectural style in the centre of the city offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous, discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed full of ancient flags and wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios.  And then there is the very Sir Lanka approach to specialised products. Every so often as you travel the island you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an expertise goes back to the kings of Kandy, for whom they turned out bowls and ornaments, religious objects, and body decoration. Three hundred years later the craftsman remain, melting and moulding, designing, and decorating, stamping, and sealing, engraving, and polishing.  A surer path to satisfaction is to park your purse and cravings for new clothes, shoes, phone accessories or mass manufactured ornaments and head for Kandy’s Royal Bar & Hotel. This old walawwa is typical of many of the buildings that haunt the city’s tiny, crowded streets, betraying with hints of bashful sorrow, the still remaining traces of striking 17th, 18th, and 19th century vernacular architecture.  Walauwas – or mansions are they are called in the West – abound in the city, as Kandyan nobles set up their family residences as close to the royal palace as possible. Proximity is power - but after the king was deposed this particular force lost its draw; and their city address became of diminishing importance. The city’s greatest walauwe is now The Queen’s Hotel. It was first turned into a mansion for the British Governors, before transcending into the hotel equivalent of an aging maiden aunt, chasing an elusive restoration as an improvised Jane Austen bride might a suitor. It’s unequalled site, on a corner overlooking both temple, lake, and palace, makes you want to go round and round the block just to take it all in properly. Many other such buildings hide down other city streets, balconies and verandas, screened windows, and opaque courtyards, squirreled away secretly behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Kandy is nothing if not the most secretive of cities. Its wonders reveal themselves best to those who look most.  “Secrets,” noted James Joyce, “silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.” But Kandy’s many secrets, held by old families in lofty mansions high above the city; in the unspoken concerns of the people who walk its streets, may be weary now – but they are most unwilling to ever be dethroned. Like threads you pick at, they unwind from way, way back - to explain almost everything. Here history is not dead; not even sleeping or dazed. It is instead ever on the lookout. Before you even get to the city’s colonial tribulations still less its modern day ones, its deeper history is a still more byzantine tale of competing plot lines in which kings, caste, money, and religion complete with such complexity as to make Human Genome Project look like a walk in the park. Its first line of kings from the Siri Sanga Bo family, wrested the kingdom’s independence from an older Sri Lankan kingdom. But beset by forcible catholic conversions, fever, and internal strife, they petered out, exhausted and baffled, in 1609, barely a hundred years later. 

This episode is dedicated to Kandy - but Kandy as the Buddhist Vatician City of Sri Lanka. Kipling believed that to understand a country and its history you had to smell it. Yet the past is documented in so many other ways - in books, or architecture; in music or even food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold its story. Even so, their stories, like their secrets, are often hard to capture, and harder still to comprehend. It is thought that there are well over 1,000 temples scattered in and around Kandy and its hinterland. Few are properly documented and remain secrets to all but the people living next to them. Each one would have once had a pivotal position in its society, its influence casting itself out like a fishing net to encompass the administration, governance, and politics of its local society in ways that are now long lost. To see such places today, shorn of all this context is like being told something intimate and confidential but having little wherewithal to properly interpret their mystery. For the island’s temples are far more than just places of worship. If every you are able to read them right, you will read the real record of the land. They are garrulous witnesses to its kings and wars, its festivals and customs, everything in fact that reflects back the country’s life for over two thousand years. Many of the island’s greatest medieval and early modern temples lie in and around Kandy. And many of these were built or restored by Kirti Sri Rajasinha, the second Kandyan king from its third and final royal family, the Nayak Dynasty of Madurai, India. An especially passionate Buddhist devotee, with a fondness for the religion’s more aristocratic expressions, it was his reforms that did much to restore Buddhism which had been badly damaged by the unrelenting forces of colonialism, especially – at the time – from the Dutch. Given Rajasinha many other challenges, including fighting the Dutch and seeing off serial internal rebellions, it is surprising he was so successful with his religious priorities. In order to jump start what by now was a most depleted Buddhist Sanga and to purge it of what he saw as practices inconsistent with the teachings of Lord Buddha, he enlisted the help of Buddhist monks from Thailand and backed the founding what became the Siam Nikaya, which is now the largest of the two most prominent Buddhist chapters on the island.   This most establishment of establishment orders is located at the Malwatu Maha Viharaya, a complex of temples and monasteries that were given the 14th century pleasure gardens of the earliest Kandyan kings as their new address. Like the White House or Vatican, Malwatu Maha is a power magnet, fusing religion and politics into so certain a draw as to ensure that, should you ever have problems locating the President, important ministers, notable visiting foreign dignities or ambitious politicians and celebrities, there is a more than certain chance that you are likely to find them queuing outside the doors of the chief prelate of the Chapter here. Barely five miles away from Malwatu Maha is another of Kirti Sri Rajasigha’s temples: the Galmaduwa, the loneliest temple in Kandy. Barely anyone goes there; indeed it is not even a proper temple, its construction being abandoned by the king whose busy mind had moved from temple making to fresco painting. Yet it is an arresting building, the most Hindu of Buddhist shrines with a high tapering gateway exactly like those used to highlight the entrances to temples across Tamil Nadu.  The frescos the king abandoned Galmaduwa Viharaya for can be seen a mile or so up the road at the Degaldoruwa Raja Maha Vihara. With hindsight, the king’s change of priority was bang on for the frescos that cover the walls of this temple are among the very greatest ever commissioned by any of the island’s kings. Despite being inevitably religious in character, telling with due piety, the story of Lord Buddha, their sub text, as well as their sheer artistry, marks them out as exceptional. Into their scenes are incorporated the images of their times – Portuguese firearms, for example, the uniformed attendants of the kings, processional elephants, fish, trees as stylised as corals, the inside of homes, flowers, furniture, coaches, queens, guest arrivals and dinner parties. On the opposite and western side of Kandy, are several other incomparable temples – albeit ones whose daily visitor numbers can be recorded with the forlorn fingers of a single hand. The greatest by a whisker is the Lankatilaka Rajamaha, built around 1350 by the kings of Gampola, Versillian rulers with a reputation for enjoying all the finer points of culture.  As the Black Death destroyed faraway Europe, Sri Lanka’s late medieval kings enlisted the artistry of a Tamil architect famous for his Hindu temples to create a Buddhist edifice that merged the Sinhalese architecture of Polonnaruwa period with Dravidian and Indo Chinese flourishes. It could have been a car crash of a building; instead Sthapati Rayar, the architect, pulled off a masterpiece. Elegant, highly incised white walls stretch into a roof of patterned tiles across three granite stories, the inside adorned with frescos.  A few miles on is the Gadaladeniya Temple. Built around the same time as the Lankatilaka Rajamaha, by the same kings, to the design of another renowned Tamil architect, Ganes Varachari, this temple is, if anything, yet more distinctive, its Vijayanagar architecture blending Dravidian, Deccan, Islamic, Hindu and Rajput features with other more common Singhala qualities. Remarkable though these temple are, one other exists that is yet more heart stopping for its sheer, naked beauty. It is best appreciated – at first at least – from afar. Very afar. From the Presence Chamber in London’s Kensington Palace in fact. For here, where English monarchs received foreign ambassadors, is a fireplace of limewood carvings and cherubs by Grinling Gibbons. No wood sculpturers are the equal of this Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal. None - expect one practicing at a similar time in the middle of Sri Lanka - Delmada Devendra Mulachari.  Mulachari is renowned for many things but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale. A medieval masterpiece, the temple had withstood wars, weather and most especially the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom – in nearby Kandy. By the 1750s it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari who lived nearby, his family, one of a number of Singhala artists from the South, having come north to seek work. Wood carver, sculptor, architect, artist, - Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy; and most especially Rajasinha. In this the king was greatly helped by Mulachari, who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake. Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. Although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry. The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By comparison, at Embekke Devale, you enter instead a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest of parts.  In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each...

This episode is dedicated to an arc of land that fans out north of Kandy, connected first with the ancient Anuradhapuran kings and their successors before passing to the control of the Kandyan kingdom, whose own borders ebbs and flowed in reaction to European invasions.This neglected northern section of the Kandyan kingdom centred on three main provinces, Anuradhapura to the far north, Matale to the northeast and the Seven Korales, to the northwest.From the arrival of the Portuguese to the final annexation of the kingdom by the British in 1815, control over these three distant provinces fluctuated.  But regardless of who was in actual control, noting could blur the fact that in almost all respects of topography, climate, history, geography, resources and economy, these areas were utterly different to the high hilly and mountainous character of the rest of the kingdom. Although ruled in most part by the Kandyan kings, their own ancestry was much much older, going back all the way to the fist Singhala king in 543 BCE. To walk through their fields and forests and witness their surviving ancient buildings is to see how the last Singla stronghold grafted itself onto the most ancient part of Sri Lanka like a limpet.And probably one of the best ways to experience it is to take a circular tour of 5 of the most significant temples that dominate this eluding land - to placs long lost to modern travellers. The circuit starts at the Vilbawa Rajamaha temple, which legend connects to Kuveni, the wife of the island’s first king, Vijaya. But Kuveni was not simply a wife – nor even a weaver of cloth, a mother, lover, or queen. Shew was 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. Kuveni, and her husband Vijaya, were the pin-up lovers of their generation, the Bonnie and Clyde of 543 BCE. Only theirs was a more unorthodox passion - more akin to Dido and Aneas, with the queen immolating herself. But whilst it is hard to find a corner of Sri Lanka that is not branded “Vijaya,” in besotted memory of the country’s founding paterfamilias, it is much harder to find similarly smitten organisations who bear the name “Kuveni.” 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 is the queen the country is too alarmed by to properly acknowledge.Kuveni was to confound and challenge all ancient ideas of womanhood; and go on challenging them to this day. Her story starts as she sits trapped at in her modest palace, a pawn in her father’s political armoury. She is, naturally, no ordinary princess. Descending from King Ravana, the ten-headed evil demon king who fatally kidnapped the wife of the Supreme Being – her bloodline offers up a clue, if ever one was needed, to a family proclivity for prolific violence, chaos, and injustice. But in Vijaya she spots a way to escape the prison of her family. Vijay, a shaved head fugitive with a penchant for what The Mahavamsa calls “evil conduct and … intolerable deeds,” was exiled by his father and arrived in Sri Lanka, a man in need of friends. Friends, land, food: in fact, at the time he arrived on Sri Lanka’s shore, he was a man in need of pretty much everything. And in Kuvani he found just about everything. Overcoming some immediate disagreements in which she almost eats him and imprisons his entire band of feckless followers, she performed a faultless volte-face, gives them food and clothing and, according to the ancient Mahavamsa Chronicle, beaming with broad indulgence, if Chronicles can be said to beam, “assumed the lovely form of a sixteen-year-old maiden.” Although marriage was what Vijaya and Kuveni agreed on, so too did they execute a plan to annihilate her Yakka tribe. But much good any of this did her. In using Vijaya, she was, in turn, to be even more devastatingly used by him. Soon after inaugurating his new kingdom at Tambapanni, and fathering two children, Vijaya abandoned her, sending to India for a more respectable princess, one who was drawing-room perfect, and banishing his native wife to the wilderness. Rejected by both husband and the people she came from and had betrayed and killed, Kuveni climbed or was forced to the top of a mountain and hurled down, cursing her disloyal husband as she died. Her husband was to die without heirs. His successor was struck down by a (presumably related) disease, and his entire children made demented by bloodshed, civil war, and familicide. Across the entire island a lonesome scrap of haunting folklore offers a hint as to the final tomb of Queen Kuveni. There is nothing to verify it except the curious behaviour of the local people. Visitors to the village are welcomed to its little temple, the Maligatenna Raja Maha Viharaya, but not permitted to walk to the top of the little hill above it, where the queen’s crypt is said to lie. About 15 miles on from here is the Ridi Viharaya. Although substantially restored in the 18th century by the Kandyan king, Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, the temple dates back to the 2nd century BCE – roughly the same time as the text of the Rosetta stone was chiselled into a basalt slab in distant pharaonic Egypt.To better understand the supreme importance of this ancient temple, take a look at pictures of the oldest of the island’s 3 greatest stupas, the Ruwanweliseya, built between 161 to 137 BCE by King Dutugamunu. The first steps in its construction are told in extraordinary detail by the Mahavamsa Chronicle. “King Dutugamunu had the workers dig a 7 cubit deep excavation. He had soldiers brought in round stones and had them crushed with hammers. Crushed stones were placed at the bottom of the excavation and compacted using elephants. The Elephants had their feet bound with leather to protect their feet. Fine clay was brought in from a nearby river. This clay was known as butter clay since it was very fine. King Dutugamunu ordered to spread butter clay on top of crushed stones. After placement of the butter clay layer, the King ordered to bring bricks. Bricks were placed on top of the butter clay layer. On top of bricks, mesh of iron was placed. Mountain crystals were placed on top of iron bars. Another layer of stones was placed on top of mountain crystals. On top of stones, 8” thick copper plate was placed. Copper plate was sprayed Arsenic and Sesame oil. On top of the copper plate, seven inch thick silver plate was placed.”And that was just the beginning. The king was to die before the stupa was completed and the Mahavamsa tells the story of the dying monarch being caried on a palanquin to see the works. Standing for centuries, and now much restored, its fabled relic chamber has yet resisted all attempts at excavation. Within it is said to be a vessel filled with Lord Buddha’s artifacts, placed atop a seat of diamonds, encased in a golden container adorned with gems, and set inside a room decorated with murals and a sliver replica of the Bo Tree. The Mahavamsa Chronicle notes its sovereign importance: “The relic-chamber shall not shake even by an earthquake; flowers that were offered on that day shall not wither till the end of Buddha Gotama's Dispensation; the lamps that were kindled shall not be extinguished; the clay that was mixed with perfume and sandalwood shall not dry; even a single scratch shall not appear within the relic-chamber; stains shall not appear in any of the golden goods that were offered.’”The money for all this construction came from silver ore that was mined from beneath the Ridi Viharaya, the ore ...

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...

Beneath the glamours quills of cinnamon or vines of pepper, Sri Lanka’s two most dazzling indigenous spices, hide a clutch of others – the secret spices whose clandestine contribution to food and medicine is the subject of this podcast. Many of Sri Lanka’s indigenous spices are barely known outside the island; indeed, so far as Tesco, Walmart or Carrefour go, they remain inscrutable, ingredients of electrifying mystery. But collectively, they may well have been what Virginia Woolf had in mind when as she sat for dinner with her husband, Leonard, the assistant government agent for the District of Hambantota - “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."  For Sri Lanka’s lesser known indigenous spices cast a distinctively captivating taste across its dishes.  The first of these reticent herbals is moringa, a short lived, fast growing, ten metre high tree, indigenous to India and Sri Lanka. It matures with good tempered ease, demanding merely tropical temperatures, water, and good drainage. Barely known outside Asia and Africa, it is a spice to covet. Every part of the plant is edible. Its leaves can be used in salads or boiled like spinach. Its flowers make a great tea and its seed pods, when young, present themselves as a rare alternative to asparagus. Its taste is grassy, a little bitter with an agreeable horseradish-like heat and flavour which explains why it is also known as the horseradish tree. According to several authoritative scientific studies of the plant, it is ridiculously healthy as well. Its dried leaves offer seven times the Vitamin C of oranges, nine times more protein than yoghurt, ten times more Vitamin A than carrots, and fifteen times the potassium of bananas.  It is widely used in Indian Ayurvedic medicine to mitigate heart disease and as anti-inflammatory, anti-cholesterol, antidepressant, and antioxidant. It may also help you see better and grow more luxuriant hair. The ancient Greeks used it in perfume. The Egyptian pharaohs depended on it for their complex death rituals. Warriors consumed it before battle. And with far less drama, it is widely used in Sri Lankan cooking and in many of the rice and curries made here on The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. It is favourite addition to all things fish; and its stars with the greatest lustre in the island’s celebrated Spicy Drumstick Curry dish.  But if it’s a touch of fusion food you are really after, go down the moringa-as-asparagus route. Collect young tender pods around a foot in length before they become too woody. Trim them in smaller asparagus like-lengths, add onion, butter, and salt, and boil them for ten minutes. Then steam the pods in a marinade of oil, vinegar, sea salt, pepper, garlic, and parsley and enjoy them with all the sophisticated delight that made Louis XIV’s obsessive consumption of asparagus so memorable as to figure in every contemporary Versailles diary.  Another of the island’s lesser known spices is brindleberry – known here as Goraka, or to give it its full and formal Latin honorific, Garcinia gummi-gutta. It is the Lewis Carroll of the spice world for the White Rabbit must have had its mercilessly caustic taste in mind as he wandered through Wonderland: “The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer day: The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And took them quite away!” It is a slow growing rainforest tree that reaches about twenty meters in height with dark shiny leaves and rough black bark. It is an unfussy plant, growing happily so long as it has its roots in deep, well drained, slightly acidic, light clay soil. In Ayurvedic medicine it is used to treat ulcers, and digestive problems. Western medicine is now busy studying its hydroxycitric acid content to better design medicines that increase fat burning whilst simultaneously reducing fat accumulation and appetite. Some scientists also believe it can be of use in managing cholesterol, stabilizing sugar levels, and protecting the body from cell damage. Goraka fruit, which resembles doll’s house-sized pumpkins, are first dried before its flesh is used in place of lime or tamarind to give dishes, especially fish dishes, a distinctly tart taste. The fruit badly needs this pre preparation as it is otherwise far too acidic to be eaten raw. Its most famous island offering is in Ambulthiyal, the classic Sri Lankan sour fish curry where, as part of a mix of spices, it turns the fish meat as stylish black as the walls of a Soho literary cocktail bar.  Gotu Kola is another of the island’s demure indigenous spcies, something of a Mother Theresa amongst spices, awash with virtue and value. Known as pennywort or centella asiatica, it is a herby perennial vegetable, with small round leaves that bud off soft stems like a kind, apple-green version of watercress. It thrives in rich, moist soil, with plenty of shade and manure – the swampy edges of ponds are an especial favourite. The leaf has a subtle earthy taste, sweet and bitter at the same time and combines especially well with coconut. It is popular in traditional medicine where it is considered to promote life expectancy and good vision. Modern science is catching up on the beneficial effects of its principal compounds – especially triterpenoid saponin, a naturally occurring sugar. Studies suggest this has many applications: as antiviral to inhibit the replication of viruses like herpes; as an antioxidant; an anti-neoplastic to combat cancers; and to promote collagen production. Other studies are in progress to identify how it helps improve memory, and support blood circulation. In Europe Gotu Kola has yet to make the leap from specialist natural food shop to supermarket but here in Sri Lanka almost any vegetable shop has it for sale. It stars in many island dishes, but the two most famous ones are as a sambal – a salad where it is combined with coconut, onions, lime, tomatoes, and pepper; and as a porridge. Kola Kanda, or Gotu Kola Herbal Rice Porridge, to give it its full and formal name, is a comfort food that is ridiculously easy to make. Red rice and a bit of garlic are boiled up. Gotu Kola and curry leaves are blended to dust, strained, and added, with coconut milk, to the cooked rice. The gorgeous green porridge is poured into breakfast bowls, and, served with a piece of sweet jaggery – and so begins a better day.  Curry leaves, the small pinnate leaves of the sweet neem tree is a commonplace ingredient in Sri Lanka and is no longer the Mr Quiet of the spice world, becoming ever better known outside of South and SE Asia and China. It has even made its first tentative appearance in such places as Sainsburys and Tesco. It is a very easy going plant, growing well from cuttings and root divisions and afraid of few, if any, animals. It reaches heights of around four meters quickly as long as it’s got decent sun. It puts up with all soil types as well as periods of prolonged dryness. It gives all the dishes it touches an earthy citrus-like flavour and a scent as if lemon grass and star anise had been twinned in some ecstatic horticultural coupling. It is especially delicious when fried with cashew nuts. Picked and used fresh off the tree, like basil in Italian cooking or marjoram in Greek dishes, there is almost no South Asian dish to which it cannot be added to deepen both flavour and scent. It has long been a staple ingredient Ayurvedic medicine to treat skin and hair problems and combat indigestion, bloating, and constipation. Westen science is studying its various chemical properties, especially its carbazole alkaloids, to improve cancer and anti-inflammatory therapies.  Despite the racial slur impli...

This podcast is dedicated to uncovering the story of those most favoured of Sri Lankan spices that came to the island – just like tourists.  And then stayed. On the distant streets of the Old Bailey in London stands F. W. Pomeroy's famous 1906 statue of Justice hanging above the entrance to Central Criminal Court. The vast and gilded Amazonian holds in one hand the sword of justice and in the other the finely balanced scales of justice. And is in in thinking how Sri Lanka’s spice history might best fit into these scales that this distant statue comes to mind.  On one side of the scales you might imagine lie the enticing black and red gold of the island’s indigenous pepper and cinnamon. These were the spices that drew in European colonists, enabling them to make untold profits and to better establish their sprawling foreign empires. And on the other, side of the scales are those spices – such as chilli, nutmeg, and vanilla - that the Europeans introduced to the island.  It is of course an invidious comparison. Imperial apologists would want to throw in all sorts of other things from railways to constitutions, tea to telephones. Nationalists would meet each opening with equal or better examples to prove the opposite. It is a bill that remains in pyretic calculation. But for foodies and spice enthusiasts what remains, even before the cost is reckoned, is the exuberant existence of the spices themselves, however they arrived.  Remarkably, though, it was Arab traders, not European colonists who made the greatest impact on the island’s spice heritage – if measured in terms of variety, range, and application. For it was through them that the final nine or so other spices so critical to the country’s character, first arrived: cloves; cardamom; coriander; cumin; fenugreek; pandam leaves; fennel; tamarind; and ginger. For these traders, working the ports of the Indian Ocean from Africa to Indonesia, they filled what was empty and emptied what was filled.  “Run, run as fast as you can! You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread Man!”  And nor can you – for there is nothing to touch the taste of ginger. Known in more formal circles as Zingiber Officinale, it is a cultigen - one of those rare species that has been so altered by mankind as to no longer exist in its original wild state.  Originating from the rainforest islands of SE Asia, it has been modified to fit human culinary and medicinal needs. It probably arrived in Sri Lanka with Arab traders, but its travel schedule is so ancient as to be all but lost. The Rig Veda, which dates to around 1400 BCE and is the world’s oldest Vedic text, mentions ginger; and later ayurvedic books elaborate its medicinal qualities - to reduce indigestion and nausea, stimulate the respiratory and nervous system; and, by improving blood circulation, act as an aphrodisiac. Recent scientific studies that have tabulated sexual function, fertility, and testosterone levels suggest that there may be something in this. Western science has also set in train a wave of further forensic research into the clinical applications of ginger – in cancer control, menstrual pain, glucose levels and in treating arthritis. It is an easy plant to grow, demanding dappled shade, well-drained soil, and high humidity. Rhizomes with green growth buds are planted in shallow depressions; and before long green leaves, sometimes up to ten feet high, spread out, accompanied by pink or white flowers so perfect in their construction as to look as if they have sprung from moulds. Within eight months the roots can be harvested and the process restarted.  Our own ginger, grown with a carefully defence mindset to ward off attacks by rampaging wild boar, lives in stone beds in the Spice Garden. At ten billion dollars and growing the global market for ginger outsteps production and so prices are higher than they really need to be. The culinary form of ginger has two main variants: white ginger – either large of small, the smaller variant being preferred for cooking; and red ginger, which is preferred in medicine. All these variants have scores of sub variants. The pale yellow flesh of Chinese ginger for example is preferred for pickles; Rangoon Ginger for oils and perfumes; and Indian ginger, like the tiny account of ginger grown in Sri Lanka, is most favoured in cooking and drinks for its much stronger taste. Its sweet, and citrusy flavour, as well as its peppery heat, alter in its preparation. When raw it is at its most pungent; dried, it is at its hottest; and cooked, it is at its sweetest.  From ginger cakes, and ginger beer to stir fry ginger beef, it is used in many dishes across the world – but perhaps none so celebrated as with Gingerbread men. England’s first Queen Elizabeth even had an official royal gingerbread maker whose only role it was to make such pasties, once famously creating edible clones of all the foreign dignitaries who assembled at her 16th century court. In Sri Lanka it is especially favoured in chicken and sambal dishes. Older even than Harry Pottrer’s Dumbledore, Tamarind, native to Africa, has been growing in India and probably Sri Lanka since at least 1300 BCE, roughly the same time as the civilizations of the late Bronze age around the Mediterranean collapsed. It has godly properties, being included in the Book of Enoch, one of those texts that was banned from inclusion in the Bible; and in the Hindu Epic, the Ramayana, a text that Hindus believe dates back 1.2 million years; though scholars argue for a later date - around 5,000 BCE. Certainly, it was old enough to be included in some of the earliest Indian Ayurvedic texts – the Charaka Samhita, the Sushruta Samhita, and the Nighantus. Its very name appears to hint at its travel history, "tamarind" being derived from the Arabic phrase “tamar hindi” which meant "Indian date." Commonly added to ayurvedic medicines to treat constipation, digestive disorders, arthritis, blood disorders, wounds, and cell health, it is now undergoing deeper scientific studies for its pharmacological properties, helping with asthma, liver problems, diabetes, and dysentery. Tamarind’s primary compound, tartaric acid, is what gives it its sour flavour – this characteristic being the reason it is so liked in Thai and Indian dishes for the gentle and complex layer of acidity it adds to curries, soups, stews, chutneys, sauces, as well as in desserts, and drinks. It pops up in Massaman, Rassam, and Pad Tha; in tamarind jam in Costa Rica; tamarind beer in the Bahamas and, since 1876, England’s legendary Lea & Perrins’ Worcestershire sauce. In Sri Lanka it is most widely used in fish, chicken, and pork curries. It grows as a long-living evergreen tree, reaching heights of eighty feet in good sun and well able to live through droughts. Lightly covered with pinnate leaves, its modest red and yellow flowers develop into hard six inch knobbly pods, the flesh within them being the best part of the tree to use.  Its cousin, in bitterness at least, is fenugreek, a plant which, though originating in Turkey six thousand years ago, became so widespread as to appear with residential ease in the texts, medicines and recipes of the first Mesopotamian and Indian civilizations, as well as those of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. Use it, advised the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE, to embalm the dead, purify the air, and cleanse the tummy. A main component of ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, it was regarded with great suspicion by western medicine – until recently. It is now enjoying an investigative renaissance as labourites around the world probe its antidi...

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...

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

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 ...

This episode is dedicated to the sprawling plantation gardens that disappear off into the jungle around Sri Lanka’s Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.      This longer of two walks, which we call THE ESTATE WALK, starts at THE PODI PATH just outside the front porch that leads into the hotel.  A traditional kitchen constructed of mud and bamboo once stood on this path, managed by Podemenike whose life roughly and remarkably followed that of independent Sri Lanka. Around 1950 she began work on the estate as a lady’s maid. It was just a few years after independence – and she stayed on to help protect the estate once the family fled after the 1987 JVP Uprising.  This violent Marxist-Leninist insurrection almost toppled the then government of President Premadasa. For over two years a state of near anarchy dominated life, with militant riots, mass executions, and assassinations affecting most areas of the island. Pro and anti-government militias added to the battle, the causalities of which, Human Rights Watch eventually estimated at 35,000 – a figure no sides yet agree on. It wasn’t the first such uprising.  In 1971 a similar insurrection occurred, this time against the Bandaranaike government, though its fatalities were considered to be less. But the 1987 rebellion was the first truly island wide event that deeply affected the estate, causing it to be abandoned by all except Podemenike and two elderly croppers, understandably fond of arrack. It was a terrible time for the country and although Podemenike’s kitchen has long since gone, as you walk down this little path, you may, at least in your imagination, still catch the smell of real village cooking - warm spices and buttery rice. THE PODI PATH cuts through a pepper plantation, arriving soon at a flight of steps on the left just before THE SPICE KITCHEN. Herein lies the entrance to THE KITCHEN GARDEN, with two special trees coming into touch on the right. The first of these is a Cannonball Tree or Sal Tree. This is a mighty and magnificent wonder, with pink white architectural flowers like half open lids that give off one of the most perfumed and refined scents you are ever lightly to encounter on this good earth. It grows to over one hundred feet and the flowers eventually turn into seeds the size of cannonballs that hang off the main stems of the tree like a wayward artillery store. The tree comes from South America and is the source of adamantly held confusions. Buddhists believe that Lord Buddha was born in a garden of sal trees in Lumbini in distant Nepal.  But the Cannonball or Sal tree growing in Sri Lanka only arrived in South Asia in the 1880s. The first one to have a detailed record is that in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, planted in on the 14th of April 1901 by Geroge V and his alarming wife, Queen Mary.  Given the extreme botanical spectacle that this tree is, it is no surprise that it has come to be conflated with the sal Lord Buddha would have known – shorea robusta, a smaller tree with little flowers and no fragrance. I hesitate to boast and brag, but the inventible conclusion from comparing our Cannonball Tree with King George’s is that our, being much larger, must predate 1901.  Beside it is what looks like Breadfruit tree. Or possibly a jacktree? Actually, it is both – a rare hybridising that occurred entirely naturally between these related species.  The relationship coach, Laura Doyle, famed, at least in California for her trademarked “Six Intimacy Skills,” remarked that “Only God is perfect. For the rest of us, there are apologies.”   And so it is for our Kitchen Garden. Invaded nightly by hungry porcupines; several times by a small herd of 20 wild boar, and often at the mercy of deer, squirrels, and monkeys, it is a wonder it ever produces any herbs or vegetables.  Even so, we limp on, brave as Obi-Wan Kenobi, planting organic wonders that will flourish all the better once we finally get around to fencing in the entire acre. The happier plants grow in a large greenhouse, mostly soft vegetables, and herbs. The area is surrounded by shade nurseries, home to hundreds of hand reared trees, destined for timber plantations or our rare trees arboretum. Returning back to the steps up which you first came to enter the kitchen garden you then pass, on your left THE SPICE KITCHEN.  This modest building was made in the traditional way as a Pandemic project in 2021 by our whole team, using bamboo, mud, and leftovers. It is the place for staff teas and lunches, and a creche. Part of the building is used to process latex, the raw white juice extracted from the estate rubber trees that is then half dried and rolled on machinery made in Wolverhampton in the 1940s.  At the building’s end is another flight of steps, this one leading up into THE HOCKIN’S SPICE GARADEN. The path through the spice garden is circular, eventually returning you back to this point.  And now you are in the Estate’s private spice garden, planted with cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, cloves, turmeric, and ginger and named for two sassy polyamorous Methodist family cousins who lived, ménage à trois, with a German POW on their remote Cornish farm for 50 years. Their three graves, side by side, overlook the sea near Morwenstow.  The only graves here however are those of the three estate elephants, their limitless night songs still heard in the hearts of those best able to join in the occasional elephant Séance. The vanilla vines we grow in THE HOCKIN’S SPICE GARADEN are descendants of the 19th century plants the British brought to the island, hoping to eclipse the commercial success the plant enjoyed in Madagascar.  But it was not to be. Fastidious, fussy, and economical, it never amounted to much even through vanilla experts commend the unusual taste that Sri Lankan vanilla has evolved to produce - “a more complex flavour profile with delicate sweetness, subtle floral notes, and hints of cherry and caramel,” or so they say.  Hand pollinated with the sort of brushes favoured by watercolourists of the more exquisite schools, it is nevertheless a bit of a hidden gem – and one that offers plenty of opportunities to practice patience. The cloves, cinnamon and pepper planted alongside it is far more robust and grow on through any amount of animal attack. But the turmeric and ginger tubers have to be husbanded carefully for they offer wild boar treats of almost libidinous pleasure and excess. Getting back to the main path from its entrance point, THE PODI PATH then leads through a large plantation of pepper vines, growing gleefully up glericidia poles. Gliricidia is the perfect plant for this, being fast growing and erect - and pumping the ground around it with lots of nitrogen. It is also much used as a living fence. The path moves on through jackfruit and clove trees and past THE ELEPHANT’S GRAVEYARD. Marked by Ceylon Oak or Koan Tree, the estate’s 3 elephants lie beneath it. The last elephant died in 1977, a few years after standing very firmly on her mahout. The plant itself is sis even longer living – and this one is about 130 years old. All around it are more Jackfruit trees, some wild with smaller leaves and other more domesticated with larger crinkled leaves and more abundant fru...

This episode is dedicated to the home garden that is wrapped around Sri Lanka’s The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.      “Once, when I was young and true,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1926, “Someone left me sad; Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad.”  Fortunately, an early broken heart was not to be my fate. Gardens were. Plants. And especially trees.   For it was gardens, not love, occupied my childish imaginings. Gardens, I concluded were all variants of a single standard – the best example to be found amidst the faultless flower beds of the governor’s house, in Madras, the Raj Bhavan. This was a proper garden. Built in the 1670s, its regimented perfection even stretched out into a deer park, whose trees were as disciplined as they were well mannered.  Of course, it helped that they were tended by armies of gardeners, but of these unsung heroes, little was ever said.  Later when I saw Versailles, it all came together. Gardens were actually houses albeit with green bits.  Over the years I tested this theory: in window baskets overlooking Scotch House Corner; on Bayswater balconies, Welsh seaside cottages, Oxfordshire villages. It seemed to hold. Until, that is, we set about gardening in the jungle.  We had bought, incautious and without any help whatsoever from Excel, a 25-acre Plantation north of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. It had been abandoned during the JVP uprisings. Its 1,000 high rocky hills stalled a Dutch army in 1765; and until the civil war the estate stretched over 100 acres with 3 working elephants. When the estate agent had closed the deal, the estate had reduced to 25 acres and a bewildering number of buildings, all of them as unstable as a Sunday morning drunk. Trees grew in rooms; animals lived on shelves. And rapidly, I realised that the real world was precisely like my childhood definition of a garden, only the other way around. Limitless green forest with the odd house attached – and forever fighting an unsuccessful campaign to keep nature at bay. Earth Org, the environmental news website, agrees, stating that despite the interminable assaults made upon it, nature is still the boss. Just 20% of Earth's land surface is either urban or farmed.  So our jungle gardening is undertaken modestly, with the lightest of hearts, the boundary between wild and tamed conveniently blurred so that excesses on either side are easily tolerated. It’s a green version of the balance of power and an opportunity to see Nudge Theory in practice. Even so, this estate, having been abandoned for twenty years before we bought it, had sided a little too firmly with the jungle. The balance of power was extravagantly unbalanced. The estate road was undrivable; the plantations had become savage forests, and trees grew in its courtyards and buildings, guests occupying superior VIP suites.  Pushing these boundaries back was like sailing down the Nile: a slow voyage, with plenty of opportunities to become distracted by everything that happens when you blink. But slowly slowly our gardening team reclaimed parts of the interior and created 4 different walks to take you around most of it. Some areas remain wild, unvisited for a decade at least, cherished no-go zones left to shy lorises and civets. Of these 4 walks, the gentlest of perambulations is The Home Garden Walk. This stroll begins just outside the main hotel office and porch, with both buildings shaded by THE PARROT DAKOTA, a tree named after New York’s towering Dakota Apartments.  This Sri Lankan Dakota version is no less a Renaissance creation – a Java Cassia, or to give it its common name, The Pink Shower Tree. Flowering with puffs of Barbie pink clouds in April and May, it fruits and sheds its leaves in December. Our specimen is over 120 years old; its hollows and defensive height making it our leading parrot apartment block. Amongst its many tenants are rose-ringed, plum-headed and Layard’s parakeets – three of the world’s 353 parrot species.  Layard’s parakeet is an easy one to spot for it has a long light blue tail, a grey head, and a fondness of sudden, prolonged screeching. The green-all-over rose-ringed parakeet is a giveaway too - with a bright red beak and the slimmest of head rings. But the most striking is the male plum-headed parakeet. He is a stunner, his proud red head offset with purple and blue feathers. He would turn heads in any nightclub. Two other parrot species live on the island but have yet to be spotted here: The Alexandrine parakeet is similar to the rose-ringed parakeet – only much larger. It’s a bit of a city dweller. The other, the sparrow-small, endemic Sri Lankan hanging parrot or lorikeet is a rare creature: a twitcher’s crowning glory. All these birds can be found in G. M. Henry’s celebrated 1958 Guide to The Birds of Ceylon, which sits in the hotel library, together with some of his original watercolours. Henry was one of the last great ornithologists – the sort you would fight to sit next to at dinner.  A discoverer as much as a describer of species, he wrote extensively about the island’s wildlife. Born on a tea estate in Sri Lanka in 1891, his bird guide is remarkable not simply for being comprehensive but also because it is so entertaining. His descriptions are unforgettable and funny; of the lorikeet, he remarks, the bird is not simply another parrot but a convivial and restless one with highly ridiculous breeding habits. Reading his identifiers, you almost feel you have met the bird concerned at a party, conference, dentist’s waiting room or orgy. Close to our blushing Cassia is KASHYAPA’S CORNER, a small garden of Frangipani trees, named for the anonymous 5th century mistress of Kashyapa, the king who built the Sigiriya pleasure palace, partying there for 22 years before being murdered.  Its frescoes show her holding the wickedly fragrant frangipani flowers – wicked, because, despite lacking nectar, their dreamy scent tricks moths into pollinating them. Arguments rage gently over whether there are twenty or 100 species of the tree; but none of this matters in Sri Lanka where the plant has been so eagerly adopted by temple goers that it is called the "Araliya" or "Temple Flower Tree". South American by origin, it spread around the world on the backs of gardening missionaries, though this does nothing to explain how its flowers came to be depicted over 1500 years ago in Sigiriya. A small tree, rarely more than 20 feet high, it flowers in shades of red and yellow, white, and peach; and even when bare is as close to architectural marvel as any tree can get. Stretching out beyond KASHYAPA’S CORNER is a croquet lawn, rather unwisely planted with Australian grass for its smoother velvety feel; but continually under siege by the more rampant and feisty Malaysian grass which possesses the invasive qualities of pirates. A much-sheered golden dewdrop hedge surrounds it; the plant is liberally tolerant of the hardest pruning and has become something of a poster girl for tropical topiarists. Growing through them are a few dozen stately Queen Palms. We call them DONA CATHERINA’S PALMS, after the island’s most beguiling queen, Kusumasana Devi. Three times tempestuous queen of Kandy (1581 to 1613), Dona Catherina died of grief, outwardly Buddhist, inwardly Catholic.  It was her bad ...