Sri Lanka

An island with a continuous written chronicle going back over two thousand years, and a civil war that grew out of a language act. Sinhalese settlement and Theravada Buddhism date from the third century BCE, and the Mahavamsa chronicle records the kings of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, whose irrigation tanks watered a rice civilisation for a millennium. Tamil kingdoms held the north. Portuguese, Dutch and then British rule followed from 1505, with the British breaking the last independent kingdom at Kandy in 1815 and importing Tamil labour from India for tea plantations. Independence came in 1948. The Sinhala Only Act of 1956 made Sinhala the sole official language, disadvantaging Tamil speakers in public employment, and successive measures on university admission and land settlement followed; anti-Tamil pogroms in 1983 began a civil war that ran until 2009, when the army destroyed the Tamil Tigers in a final offensive with heavy civilian casualties that remains the subject of international inquiry. The Tigers pioneered the suicide belt. The 2004 tsunami killed over thirty thousand people. An economic collapse in 2022 drove the president out of the country. Ceylon tea remains the best-known export. The country has about twenty-two million people. Sinhala and Tamil are both official. Sigiriya, a palace on a rock column, and the cave temples of Dambulla are World Heritage sites. The island was called Ceylon until 1972. It has the highest literacy rate in South Asia. Cinnamon originated on the island and Colombo remains its main port. Buddhism arrived with a mission sent by Ashoka.

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