Episodes

  • Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years

    Sigiriya & The Party That Lasted 22 Years
    Aug 16 2025
    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 ...
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    30 mins
  • Gods & Ghosts: A Tour of Secret Trincomalee

    Gods & Ghosts: A Tour of Secret Trincomalee
    Aug 16 2025
    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 ...
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    31 mins
  • Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List

    Escape: The Sri Lankan Reading List
    Aug 16 2025
    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, ...
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    20 mins
  • Demon Queen: The Quest for Kuveni

    Demon Queen: The Quest for Kuveni
    Aug 16 2025
    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...
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    26 mins
  • Bejewelled: Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires

    Bejewelled: Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires
    Aug 12 2025
    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 ...
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    30 mins
  • Sri Lanka's 50 Best Hotels

    Sri Lanka's 50 Best Hotels
    Aug 11 2025
    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 ...
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    33 mins
  • The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka: Part 2

    The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka: Part 2
    Jul 2 2025
    After the excesses of Prince Vijaya and Queen Annua, it is time to encounter our third candidate king and winner of an abiding place in the island’s register of wicked monarchs. So little is actually known about Yassalalaka Tissa, King of Anuradhapura that he almost fails to make the cut. And yet three key qualifications mark him, two of which are so beautifully distinctive as to ensure his remembrance for as long as anyone ever bothers to remember the island’s ancient kings. His path to power was so traditionally iniquitous that has become an almost essential distinction for any candidate for this guide: he murdered his predecessor. Simply by virtue of his ascension, Yassalalaka Tissa makes the grade, though the ancient sources helpfully validate this by calling him “a vicious ruler.” But by virtue of his placement in the line of the founding Vijayan kings, his inclusion here offers an irresistible and matchless neatness to the account. For he was to be the last true Viyayan ruler. His own murder, in 60 CE, just 8 years after seizing the throne, brought to an end the royal dynasty that, more than any other, set up the country to be what is was. And what an ending it was, its preposterous characteristics being the third main reason to include in this guide. Yassalalaka Tissa own reign suffered from the fact that his dynasty had never really recovered from the effects of having overcome the island’s third invasion by Tamil warlords between 103 to 89 BCE. This was to so weaken the kingdom as to fatally undermine its confidence and capability. It all started with yet another grubby and bloody power struggle that saw one brother kill another to grab the throne before passing it on – briefly – to yet another bother, Khallata Naga, who was himself to be despatched by a fourth, Valagamba, in 103 BCE. It was a damned succession. Barely had Valagamba digested the celebratory when all the hounds of hell slipped their leads and the kingdom’s preeminent port, Mahatittha (now Mantota, opposite Mannar) fell to invaders. The third Tamil invasion of Sri Lanka was on. Valagamba fled, lucky to be alive and in a 14-year tableau reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s novel “Five Little Pigs” the once grand Anuradhapura Kingdom was then manhandled to atrophy. Two of the Dravidians returned to India, leaving one of the remaining five, Pulahatta, to rule from 104-101 BCE. At this point, history struggles to keep up. Pulahatta was killed by Bahiya, another of the five remaining Dravidians and head of the army, who was in turn murdered in 99 BCE by Panayamara, the third Dravidian who had been unwisely promoted to run the army. Proving those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it, Panayamara was assassinated in 92 BCE by his general, the fourth Dravidian, Pilayamara. But by now Valagamba, ever the comeback king, began his return, his guerrilla tactics toppling Pilayamara who had lasted all of seven months on the throne; and then defeating the last of the Pandyan chiefs, Dathika. Valagamba’s return to power should have seen in a long lasting and confident restart for the dynasty – but too much blood had been split, and regicide had been so normalized as to undermine nearly every succeeding monarch with its malign and cancerous weight. Two periods over the next 130 years in particular were to be its undoing, the first being the chaos unleased by the ambitions of Queen Annua herself who murdered 7 kings before being murdered in her turn. Just 5 kings later chaos once again took hold, when a civil war, promoted by one too many serial regicides, caught up with a king called Kanirajanu Tissa who was to be despatched in 33 CE by his successor, Chulabhaya in time honoured fashion. Dead within 2 years, Chulabhaya’s sister, Sivali took the throne for 4 months before – but by now a proper civil war had struck up, with all its attendant disasters, including leaving they kingdom itself utterly ruleless for periods of time. Sivali bobs up and down in the months succeeding her ascension vying for control of the state in what looks like a three cornered struggle between herself, her nephew Ilanaga and the Lambakarnas. For by now the Vijayan dynasty not only had itself to contend with – it also had the much put upon and exasperated nobility, especially the Lambakarna family. Little about this period of Sri Lankan history is certain, except that from around 35 CE an uncensored civil war preoccupied the entire country, leaving it without any plausible governance. For a time Ilanaga seemed to be ahead of the pack. But he then seems to have scored a perfect own-goal when he demoted the entire Lambakarna clan. This abrupt change in their caste, in a country held increasingly rigid by ideas of caste, galvanised them into full scale rebellion. The king – if king he really was – fell and fled into the hill country, returning 3 years later at the head of a borrowed ...
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    28 mins
  • The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka: Part 1

    The Wicked Monarchs of Sri Lanka: Part 1
    Jul 1 2025
    The awful thing about wickedness is just how interesting it is. Kind and benevolent rulers; admirable warrior kings; even the fumbling but kindly nice ones who build hospitals and live blameless lives – they all pale into guilt-wrenching insignificance when set before a list saturated by the sinful, iniquitous, and depraved. And in this respect, Sri Lanka is spoilt for choice, simply by virtue of its statistics. Around 200 kings, with the odd queen, ruled over the island from its first recorded beginnings in 543 BCE to its last king, packed off into exile by the invading British in 1815. From island wide kingdoms to ones circumscribed by covetous foreign occupiers, the 2358 years of royal rule the country enjoyed was a big dipper experience. It was just as Longfellow had once said of a little girl: “when she was good, she was very, very good/ But when she was bad, she was horrid.” The country’s monarchs averaged little over 11 years a reign, but with massive variances. Most lapped up a rule of just a few years; sometimes only a few hours. A happy few enjoyed reigns that must have seemed an eternity to their fortitudinous subjects. Buit if the ancient chronicles are to be believed, almost half of them died well ahead of their divinely allocated time – at the hands of their own successors, often, sons, sometimes bothers, uncles or even wives or occasionally an invading Indian emperor or edgy Tamil warlord. No known studies have been done to precisely identify which county can claim to be the most regicidally minded, but in any future list only a fool would put money on Sri Lanka not scoring somewhere around the top 5. From this long bloody start, regicide took a modest back seat during the rule of the Dutch and the British. But things picked up after independence in 1948. Assassination, often but not always fostered by civil war, promoted the killing of a sitting president, a prime minister, and leading presidential candidate, Vijaya Kumaratunga, whilst another almost killed his own wife, the then president, Chandrika Kumaratunga in 1999. It was but one of many other fortunately failed attempts at regicide that the independent republic had to face, a trait that reduced, at times, its own leaders to accusing one another of hatching yet more malodorously mortal plots. But selecting just 6 of the country’s most egregious baddies – barely 7% of the total of potential scoundrels - is as difficult as selecting which chocolate to take from an Anton Berg’s Heart Box. The box has an impossibly delicious mix of pralines, marzipan, nougat, soft caramel, coconut, sea salt, orange, Chocolate Liqueur, Nut Truffle, hazelnut, cherry, and apricot. To make it to this list a Sri Lankan monarch had to be very bad indeed, a real and indisputable villein. The list begins, quite neatly, with the county’s first recorded king. Embodying a prescient creation myth, which, like all many of their type, mix horror and achievement in as much equal measure as going into labour, Prince Vijaya fits the bill perfectly. As Romulus and Remus had earlier demonstrated in faraway Rome, being a founding father often necessitated random acts of abomination and cruelty. And so it was with Prince Vijaya. Even his father heartily disapproved of him. Coming from a royal Indian family said to have been descended from lions, psychologists might argue that the prince never had a chance. Violence was in his nature. But the Mahavamsa, the great ancient Chronicle of Sri Lanka that is rarely modest in praising anything remotely proto nationalistic, pulls no punches when it comes to its paterfamilias. Given its mission (“compiled for the serene joy and emotion of the pious,”) the Mahavamsa had little other choice but to call a spade a spade. “Vijaya,” it begins, as it meant to go on, “was of evil conduct and his followers were even (like himself), and many intolerable deeds of violence were done by them. Angered by this the people told the matter to the king; the king, speaking persuasively to them, severely blamed his son. But all fell out again as before, the second and yet the third time; and the angered people said to the king: `Kill thy son.’” For the king, this helpful request enabled him kill two birds with a single stone. He chose to rid himself of not just his own son, but of most of his kingdom’s rogues, whilst demonstrating, like the consummate politician he was, blameless clemency. The Mahavaṃsa records how “then did the king cause Vijaya and his followers, seven hundred men, to be shaven over half the head and put them on a ship and sent them forth upon the sea, and their wives and children also.” The problem was exported. The prince sailed away from India and “landed in Lanka, in the region called Tambapanni on the day that the Tathagata lay down between the two twinlike sala-trees to pass into nibbana.” This time reference (“Tathagata”) to Lord Buddha non withstanding, ...
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    21 mins