Sri Lanka: history and heritage

About Sri Lanka: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Sri Lanka Editorial Team

Regional Editor, South Asia: Tara de la Motte

Sri Lanka has written chronicles reaching back more than two thousand years, and eight UNESCO World Heritage sites on an island smaller than Ireland. Its great kingdoms built reservoirs and stupas; Arab, Indian and Chinese traders came for its gems and cinnamon; and three European empires, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, followed. Its peoples, Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors, Burghers, Malays and the Vedda, make it one of the richest cultures in Asia.

At a glance

Population: about 21.8 million (Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka, Census of Population and Housing 2024, preliminary results).

Peoples: Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Tamils, Indian Tamils, Sri Lankan Moors, Burghers of Portuguese and Dutch descent, Malays and the Vedda, the island’s indigenous people.

Three European empires came for the cinnamon; the island’s kingdoms had been building for two thousand years.

Shaped by: the Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Kandyan kingdoms, Buddhism (from the third century BC), Arab and Indian traders, Portugal (1505–1658), the Dutch East India Company (1658–1796), Britain (1796–1948) and independence on 4 February 1948.

UNESCO World Heritage includes: Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Sigiriya, Dambulla, Kandy, the Old Town of Galle, the Sinharaja Forest and the Central Highlands.

The first peoples

The Vedda are the island’s indigenous people, descendants of its earliest hunter-gatherers. According to the Mahavamsa chronicle, Indo-Aryan settlers arrived from northern India in the sixth century BC, the ancestors of the Sinhalese; Tamils from southern India have lived on the island for more than two thousand years.

The ancient kingdoms

Buddhism arrived in the third century BC, and Anuradhapura grew into one of the great cities of the ancient world, with vast stupas and reservoirs. Sigiriya, the rock fortress, was built in the fifth century AD; Polonnaruwa was the capital from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries; and the kingdom of Kandy, keeper of the Temple of the Tooth, held the hill country until 1815.

The Portuguese

Arab traders had long settled on the coast, the ancestors of many Sri Lankan Moors, when the Portuguese arrived in 1505. They fortified Colombo, controlled the coastal cinnamon trade, and brought Catholicism, which remains strong along the west coast.

The Dutch

The Dutch East India Company took Colombo in 1656 and the last Portuguese stronghold in 1658. The Dutch dug canals, built the fort at Galle, now UNESCO World Heritage, and introduced Roman-Dutch law, which still forms part of Sri Lanka’s legal system. Their descendants are among the Burghers.

The British and tea

Britain took the Dutch possessions in 1796 and the kingdom of Kandy in 1815, uniting the island as Ceylon. Coffee gave way to tea after a blight in the 1870s, and Tamil workers from southern India were brought to the plantations of the hill country, served by railways climbing from Colombo to Kandy and Ella.

Independence and Bawa

Ceylon became independent on 4 February 1948 and a republic named Sri Lanka in 1972. A long civil war ended in 2009, and the island has rebuilt since. The architect Geoffrey Bawa created tropical modernism, with its open pavilions, courtyards and gardens; his Parliament complex at Kotte and his own garden at Lunuganga are its masterpieces.

Our advice: start at the National Museum in Colombo, spend a night in the walled Old Town of Galle, and take the hill-country train from Kandy to Ella. Visit Sigiriya at opening time, before the heat.

Sources

Population: Department of Census and Statistics, Sri Lanka, Census of Population and Housing 2024 (preliminary). History: Department of Archaeology, Sri Lanka; Central Cultural Fund; UNESCO World Heritage Centre; National Museum of Colombo; Geoffrey Bawa Trust.

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