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Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

By: The Ceylon Press
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 The Ceylon Press' Complete Audio Books tell the stories of some of Sri Lanka's most remarkable people, places and events.Copyright 2025 The Ceylon Press Social Sciences Travel Writing & Commentary World
Episodes
  • The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka

    The Seven Wonders of Ancient Sri Lanka
    Oct 16 2025
    Although The Seven Wonders of Ancient Lanka is given over to exploring and celebrating the seven greatest wonders of the ancient Sri Lankan world, it is dedicated to the country’s paramount modern wonder, Marina Hussein.Despite their iconic status, the original seven wonders of the ancient world come up short when compared to the seven wonders of ancient Lanka, this subject of this podcast. The world’s first Seven Wonders was assembled in the 1st century BCE by the historian, Diodorus of Sicily, albeit with help from Herodotus who began the tally 400 years earlier. Their list, focused on the Mediterranean and near east, comprised a garden, two tombs, two statues, a temple, and a lighthouse. It featured the Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Sri Lanka’s list, though, is not all architecture with a nod to gardens – it is comprehensive, including as it does a painting, a monastery, a book, a piece of revolutionary new technology that enabled a treasured dish, a shrine, a tree, and a lake. It covers around a thousand years of the island’s first period of recorded history from around 500 BCE to 500 CE. Each item is more than a mere wonder for each helped set the abiding characteristics of the nation that has been called many magical names before settling on “Sri Lanka “– the Sanskrit words for shining island. This apparent lexical borrowing is no random thing - for Sanskrit, a Bronze age Indo-European language, is the lexis that has most influenced Sinhala, the language spoken by most Sri Lankans today. And its words, like the clues of an antique detective story, can be traced right back to many others that occur in European, Iranian, and North Indian languages. Orphan language it is most certainly not. Its lexical connections demonstrate the astonishing antiquity of the island’s culture, and, likewise, the seven wonders explored here connect the country not just to its past, but also to its present. Invaded, occupied, plundered though it has been so often, there was ever something inimitably robust and resilient about its culture that ensured that the island, with each new renaissance, was able to use the best of its past to inform its future - with deep and confident certainty. The story starts, quite inappropriately, where it ends - when the ancient world itself came crashing to a bloody end around the base of a 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 ...
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    41 mins
  • The Jungle Spice Garden

    The Jungle Spice Garden
    Sep 29 2025
    Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless. Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler; and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of excel by the best intended of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was; and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the alter of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more attendants, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to that of State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar. The plantation came with twenty five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle – though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater safety of Colombo. And, as with all things tropical, the land settled back comfortably into the loving hands of nature, with a sigh, as if all that building and harvesting, planting, and living was in some inexpressible way, a trifling and passing distraction, now best forgotten. But possessing land is habit-forming. And soon enough our acquisition was followed by the purchase of more acres. And another house. Further acres, once part of the wider estate before it was decimated by Land Reforms, were incorporated on long term rents until the estate had more than doubled in size, the various land parcels threaded together by the slimmest of jungle tracks. One large plot was planted as vegetable beds but lay so trenchancy close to a misbehaved river that the onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes had little choice but to fester and moulder. Another was set aside to grow sandalwood trees. This, as it turned out, was a poor choice. Glamorous though the trees undoubtedly are, keeping them in the style to which they wish to become accustomed is harder even than keeping a mistress in Paris. The slightest variant in water resulted in sulky die-back. The tree’s high maintenance root system, which demanded the presence of other plant roots to attach to, meant a continual need to throw what amounted to hedonistic horticultural parties; and when all that had been sorted, Sandalwood Spike Disease arrived. An entire valley was planted out with thousands of bananas, all of which succumbed to Fusarium wilt. Lemon grass was seeded on well drained hill sides, most of which caught fire during the drought. Mushrooms, a great favourite of our auditor, were added - more out of good manners than any real attempt to be commercial. The old rubber terraces were recklessly entrusted to a horticultural bandit who lacerated the trucks to produce quick flows of sap, injuring the trees for years to come. Terraces of new rubber trees were established. “Harvest the latex,” advised one enterprising land agent, “and move up the value chain.” Make didoes,” he went on to suggest: “the few on sale on the island are all expensive imports.” Greenhouses of tomato and pepper were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind such fruit as only the angriest chef might use. Several acres worth of nurseries to raise cinnamon, cloves and erica nuts were built, the tiny plants intended for resale onto the local agriculture board, though porcupine, gathering in force for nightly raids, had alternative ideas. As the estate’s plantation workers grew into a small army, supervisors with, it turned out, imperfect circadian rhythms, were recruited to manage and mentor the mildly mutinous troops. On the hottest days, sleep under the shade of mango trees seemed the only option. One manager, tempted to distraction by thoughts of ill-gotten lucre, was later to be seen gazing woefully...
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    1 hr and 56 mins
  • Sun Kings: The Story of Sri Lanka's Icarus Dynasty

    Sun Kings: The Story of Sri Lanka's Icarus Dynasty
    Sep 29 2025
    The book recounts the kings of Sri Lanka’s second ancient royal dynasty – one that started with the best of guardian intentions; but which later came crashing down to earth. It is dedicated to Tim in Bristol, whose steady, thoughtful and bankable qualities are precisely what most of the sun kings in this narrative would have benefited from having in much greater measure. Far into the north of Sri Lanka, forty kilometres from Anuradhapura to the south, and fifty more to the western seaboard, lie the ruins of a shrivelled reservoir - Kuda Vilach Chiya. The tank is close to some of the country’s most iconic and mythical sites, including the landing place of Prince Vijay, paterfamilias of the nation, the palace of his forsaken native queen; and the country’s first recorded Singhala kingdom. Kuda Vilach Chiya sits on the eastern edge of what is now Wilpattu National Park. Reaching the spot is no easy matter since it lies within a deep entangled jungle for which special permission must be granted to gain access. Even after that, it requires a tractor to take you any closer to the site, and then a lengthy journey on foot. For countless centuries this has been leopard country. Wilpattu’s vast 130,000-hectare wilderness is one of the island’s best kept wildlife secrets, so well off the tourist trail as to exponentially nurture its hundreds of rare species of fauna and flora - along with many endemic species: the Toque and Purple-faced Leaf Monkeys, Golden Palm Cat, Mouse Deer, Dwarf Toads, Hour-Glass Tree and Wood Frogs, Ceylon Jungle Fowl and Ceylon Grey Hornbill. Even the ultra-rare Sloth bear can be seen here, attracted by the sweet golden fruit of the Palu Tree. But despite all these exceptional features, it is for its water that Wilpattu matters most. Its name is more literally translated as the “land of Villu,” “villu” being lakes. The whole area is pockmarked with shallow rainwater lakes. But the lakes are eclipsed by Kuda Vilach Chiya, a much more deliberate water feature, and one that is hard to make much sense of at first. Today it amounts to little more than a long two-to-three-kilometre embankment overgrown by trees and grasses and breached in many places by migratory elephants. It is all that remains of the extraordinary man-made lake that was constructed here sometime after 67 BCE by the first Lambakanna king, Vasabha. Hardier survivors from that time are two masterpieces of ancient aqua engineering, the creation of which allowed Sri Lanka’s builders to construct astonishingly vast water reservoirs. These in turn would propel the 500-year-old kingdom into the political stratosphere. The constructions – Bisokotuwas – allowed water to exit a reservoir without putting so much pressure on the dam embankment that it would collapse. As a result, the size of the reservoir was able to scale up to unprecedented levels; and water of unimaginably enormous quantities could be collected to extend agriculture, support ever larger and more urban populations and produce crops whose surplus would rapidly and exponentially enrich the young state. The Bisokotuwas at Kuda Vilach Chiya are precision made structures, the stone slabs used on the inner face fitting so perfectly together that there is no room for even the modest weed to grow. Rising above it, the sluice tower itself can still be seen, part of the same remarkable lost laboratory of water. The same Lambakanna king, Vasabha, is also credited with the construction of the Mahavilach Chiya Wewa, a tank barely five kilometres away from Kuda Vilach Chiya, with a storage capacity of two thousands four hundred acres that even now is a key part of the modern Sri Lanka’s water infrastructure. Quite why two such large tanks were built so close to one another is a mystery. But their very existence, and that of the Bisokotuwas that made them possible, is the point that most matters. The area around Kuda Vilach Chiya, though remote even by Sri Lankan standards, bears the impact of multiple moments of serious history. Not for nothing was it chosen for its capacious reservoirs. It was once a place of some importance. Ten thousand years earlier and thirty kilometres north are hypnotic cave paintings of the Neolithic age in Tantirimale. Two hundred or so years earlier the local temple, Thanthirimale Rajamaha Viharaya, marks the spot where the sacred Bo tree rested as it travelled to Anuradhapura from India under the protection of the Indian Emperor Ashoka’s daughter, Sangamitta. Some historians even believe that the site was once home to the lost kingdom of Panduvasdewu Nuwara, the early Vijayan realm that most immediately predated Anuradhapura itself. A monastery lies on the same site, its excavated gardens littered with stone containers created to contain gems, and the statues of gods and lions ruined when the country’s last unitary kingdom fell to invaders in 1215 CE. And in ...
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    1 hr and 30 mins
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