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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
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  • Sun Kings: The Story of Sri Lanka's Icarus Dynasty

    Sun Kings: The Story of Sri Lanka's Icarus Dynasty
    Aug 3 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
  • The Great Dynasty: The Story Of The Kings Who Made Sri Lanka

    The Great Dynasty: The Story Of The Kings Who Made Sri Lanka
    Aug 2 2025
    This book tells the story of the kings who made Sri Lanka – its founding fathers, all members of the Great Dynasty – the Vijayans. And it is dedicated to Bianca, whose has founded, in her own utterly loyal, grand, wise and loving way, a Sri Lankan dynasty like no other. Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch was to found a dynasty that would last over 600 years. Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off the start of recorded Singhala history despite its first 100 years being anything but plain sailing. Occasional bouts of regicide, lassitude, rebellion and navel gazing aside, the dynasty was as textbook perfect as it could reasonably be expected to be and Prince Vijaya’s thirty-six successors did all that was necessary to embed, improve, and make dominant the tiny state they had first instituted in the northwest of the land. Not one to sit upon their laurels, and with a flair for marketing well ahead of their time, the Vijayans relaunched their realm barely a quarter of the way through their term, branding it as the kingdom of Anduraupura. They ruled it, according to the later Stone Book or Galpota Inscription, as human divinities, their almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned by virtue of their unusual and holistically philosophical approach to life and governance. Their capital city would become one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities, enriched by cutting edge industry, resources, structures, administrators, soldiers and all the other many disciplines critical to a successful ancient kingdom. Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most if not all the island. To the east and south lay Ruhunurata, or Ruhana, a linked but junior principality founded around 200 BCE by Prince Mahanaga, brother to Devanampiya Tissa, the 7th or 8th monarch of the dynasty, and great-great-great-great-great nephew of Prince Vijaya himself. To the west lay the third, much smaller principality of Mayarata, another linked family fiefdom, said to have been founded in the fourth century BCE by Prince Vijaya’s nephew, Panduwasdev, the dynasty’s third monarch. Like light bulbs experiencing the almost reassuringly familiar power cuts and surges of the current Ceylon Electricity Board, a state company forever preoccupied by internal disputes, both principalities rose, fell and rose again, depending on quite how strong the Anduraupuran king was at any one time. All this was, of course, good wholesome leadership – but it was hardly groundbreaking. Seen from the perspective of the Shang, Hittites Achaemenids, Ptolemaics; the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas or other numerous successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations of sound hegemonic hereditary rule. It was only halfway through the span of the Vijayan rule that, in welcoming to the island, Mahinda, the Buddhist son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, they did something that changed everything. In this, their simple act of hospitality, they were to remodel their kingdom to be so profoundly different to any other, anywhere, as to endow it with an authority and energy so inimitable, that, even today, it is protected and characterised by that misty encounter of 247 BCE. Not only did the Vijayans welcome the young royal missionary; they took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with it, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism. Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and despite the later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more suitably described as a philosophy. In welcoming Mahinda, the Vijayans crossed the line from standard overlords to philosopher monarchs governed by a formidable moral code and a preoccupation to achieve a state of transcendent bliss and well-being. If being an island was the first and foremost explanation for why Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, Buddhism is of course, its second explanation. And a much more impressive one too, for it was a deliberate act – one that no less comprehensively than geography was to profoundly colour the country as if it had been dyed in Tyrian purple itself, that ancient and legendary dye, reserved by threat of death, for the clothes of the Roman emperors or the sails of Queen Cleopatra’s royal barge. Of course, not every king or subsequent island ruler made the moral imperatives of Buddhism his or her magnetic north; but most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings. As they are still today by ordinary citizens in towns and villages across the land. For however ordinary are ordinary Sri Lankans, they are also unexpectedly religiously minded ...
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    2 hrs and 4 mins
  • And That's How It All Began: Sri Lanka

    And That's How It All Began: Sri Lanka
    Jul 31 2025
    This book explores the very earliest days of Sri Lankan history and is dedicated to Simon, whose kind wisdom has taught me how history is a shadow that goes ahead.It took a refugee from Nazi Germany, with an interests in economics and Buddhism to note the singular connection between two of the most obvious characteristics that distinguish Sri Lanka. “Small,” remarked E. F. Schumacher in his eponymous book in 1973, “is beautiful.” It was economics, rather than Sri Lanka that Schumacher had in mind, but, as with all seismic observations, his simple statement lent a formative new way to understand previously inexpressible truths.For Sri Lanka is both small and beautiful. So small in fact that it could fit into India 50 times; into Britain almost 4 times or even Peru almost 20 times. Its nearest neighbour, Tamil Nadu, could accommodate it twice over, with land to spare. Head a little further north and 10 times more people crowd into nearby Pakistan, or 6 more into Bangladesh. Schumacher’s only other book, published on his deathbed in 1977, “A Guide for the Perplexed”, is a study of how humans live in the world – but it could easily have lent its title to a mandatory guidebook for issue to every person who passes through Bandaranaike Airport, citizen or guest, VIP or economic migrant.For little about the island is straightforward, despite or because of its size and beauty. Confronting it for the first time is like first encountering Rubik’s Cube, that infamous multi coloured rotating brick toy whose coloured ends appear so easy to organise into blocks. The outcome, though satisfying, and apparently almost effortless, remains virtually impossible to achieve. Just below the surface of almost everything on the island, and simmering with delight, richness, chaos, or just plain thwarting befuddlement, lies the complexity of what is quite possibly the most byzantine and bewitching country in the world.The more you see, the more you wonder. Why? Why, for example, make a simple presidential election quote so convoluted and full of enough own-goal traps to risk making the spoiled votes equal to the good ones? The 2024 presidential election brought almost 40 candidates forward for a preferential style vote of such complexity that the Election Commission had to issue a two hundred word note on how to mark the ballot paper correctly. But perhaps this is to worry unnecessarily for the country’s political system has, as horse riders might note, plenty of form. By 1978, when the current constitution was adopted, it had already enjoyed 3 earlier ones, roughly one every 16 years. Now regulated by this, its second constitution since independence, Sri Lanka possesses a governing document of such elastic resilience that it has undergone an average of one major amendment every second year and has still survived. Such political robustness is nothing less than what should be expected of an island whose circuitous history meanders through over 2,500 recorded years to take in at least 12 former capital cities, as many, if not more kingdoms, and 300 recorded kings, some half of whom were estimated to have murdered the other half. Conundrums, reversals and the sudden appearance of polar partisan opposites have riotously followed almost every step of that wild journey. The kings eventually made way for the world’s first elected female head of a modern state when in July 1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike was elected Prime Minister. Yet in 2018 a new President reimposed a four-decade-long ban on women buying alcohol. Given that barely 6% of the country’s supreme law-making body, its parliament, is filled with female MPs, this institutional sexism is understandable – but to fully explain it one needs to look little further than the fact that just under a fifth of all MPs have just one A level to their credit. But there’s much more to the rule of law than exams. Should parliament depress you, look to the country’s Supreme Court, a focused and resilient body that has thwarted attempted coups and power grabs through the decades. “Do I contradict myself?” asked the American poet, Walt Whitman. “Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.). And so too does Sri Lanka. Despite Nobel Prize winning scientists, Booker-prize winning writers, and architects that have profoundly reshaped how people live right across the tropical world, its best universities barely scrape into the top one thousand worldwide with a pedagogy that deliberately fails almost half its students.Honest domestic consumers eager to pay their electricity bill must first correctly guess which of 8 categories they fit into before they can pay up, proof, if ever it was needed, that here at least there is little pleasure to be had in being a consumer. Used car prices have more than doubled in the past few years, and at any one time, eggs, onions, rice, milk powder or even turmeric have...
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    1 hr and 1 min
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