The Kingdom That Walked On Water: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 10 cover art

The Kingdom That Walked On Water: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 10

The Kingdom That Walked On Water: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 10

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 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 get you any closer to the site, followed by 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” meaning “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 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 with trees and grasses, breached in many places by migrating 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 placing excessive pressure on the dam embankment, thereby preventing it from collapsing. As a result, the size of the reservoir could scale to unprecedented levels, water in 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 fit so perfectly together that there is no room for even the smallest 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 from Kuda Vilach Chiya, with a storage capacity of 2,400 acres, which is still a key part of 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 matters most. The area around Kuda Vilach Chiya, though remote even by Sri Lankan standards, has been shaped by multiple significant historical events. 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 Neolithic cave paintings at 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 carved to hold gems, and the statues of gods and lions, ruined when the country’s last unitary kingdom fell to invaders in 1215 CE. And in the nearby jungle, ancient monastic caves crouch, decorated with a script that predated Buddhism itself – Brahmi. All around it stretch the flat and softly undulating lands of the country’s massive Dry Zone. Much of Sri Lanka is very dry - as if the land itself had been bled white and hung out to dry. It is not perennially wet like Bangladesh. This is especially true of the Rajarata, the land most ...
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