A Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera

And we start with a little bit of retail therapy, which will take you down one of the world’s busiest high streets.    

 

And if you wonder about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the world; marvel instead - because, yes, you have come to Galagedera, the first highland village you encounter as you drive from the immense dry plains of northern Sri Lankan into the Central Highlands. 

 

Here, at 1,000 feet, the Galagedera Gap stretches out, where in 1765 the Dutch Army were defeated by soldiers of the Kandyan king. Stones rolled down onto the army from the adjacent hill. The Dutch sued for peace, returned to Colombo, and accepted defeat. 

 

Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As the retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalisation and changing consumer habits has made only the most modest of footprints.  Within the next 30 years, this will surely change - but for now, to travel down its length in a tuk-tuk is like time-travelling in the Tardis.  Once upon a time, your village looked a little like this.

 

The tour may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no chance of breaking for a martini, still less an almond croissant – but no matter.  Behind Galagedera’s busy frontages are nearly all the things that most people need most of the time: on their doorstep and not concealed behind knotty road networks in gloomy retail parks.

 

Galagedera High Street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and businesses on either side, beginning on the left as you slip out of the gates of the Flame Tree Hotel and set off down the Rambukkana road.  

 

At almost any time of the day, it brims with pedestrians and traffic – especially other tuk tuks.  Pause and watch.  People talk.  They pause and gossip, trade news, and they know one another.   Amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fishmongers and butchers, woodcarvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, there is a wide range of businesses and services.

 

LEFT OUT OF THE GATES, and it is the hospital you arrive at first, an agreeable village example of the free and universal health care system enjoyed right across the country.  Sri Lanka’s health system has had a seismic impact on national life, improving life expectancy and dramatically reducing maternal and infant deaths.  It runs parallel to paid-for private health care, offering faster and sometimes more advanced treatment.  And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system supported by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching colleges, and a bespoke government ministry.

 

Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and admits around 20 patients to its wards, cared for by around five doctors and 40 nurses.  Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care, and maternity care are all provided, but more complex cases and conditions are referred to the central state hospital in Kandy.  

 

This includes, on average, 10 snake bites per year, but not scorpion bites, which can be treated locally.  Colds, flu, and road accidents are all typical of its challenges – but so too are people injured by falling off trees or being hit by falling coconuts.

 

Next up is the village’s central bus station, which receives buses to and from Kandy or Kurunegala throughout the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate's Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide, and a short walk from the village’s large police office, one of 600 nationwide.  

 

Close at hand, and convenient for a tidy court appearance, is the village’s tiny handloom workshop: authentic looms being worked by real people to produce lovely, patterned fabric.  

 

Further along is the Galagedera Primary School and the Sujatha Girls School.  Founded in 1906, this is the only girls' school in the area, teaching around 1,000 pupils from first grade on. 

 

The village’s primary school, Galagedera Central College, is tucked away behind the town.  Founded over 120 years ago, this large state school takes in students aged 10 to 18, with about 70 staff members educating 1,000 students.

 

For hardcore consumers, a retail treat comes next with The Global Electrics and Paint Shop, owned by one of 3 brothers, the hardware tycoons of the village.  The second brother trades in items such as cement, plumbing, and electrics, and the third in glass.  They are a second-generation business family, with the enterprise having started 40 years earlier.

 

Their somewhat surprising neighbour is Green Life, a plantation investment company that specialises in guavas. 

 

Given that the fruit, delicious in jams, desserts, and chutneys, originated in South America but has been used in traditional Sri Lankan medicine for hundreds of years, it likely arrived sometime after 1505 with the Portuguese.  Guavas are grown mainly in the dry zone, not in the hill country of Galagedera, so this anomaly of an office is a rare and mysterious thing, as much to me as to its manager.  

 

Then you encounter one of the village’s great retail treasures: the Ayurveda Medicine Shop.  Once little larger than a wardrobe, this enterprise has ballooned over the past 8 years and sells over 100 different pungent herbs, made up to whatever prescription the customer presents.  

 

Amongst its many wonders is devil’s dung.  Made from the dried latex of carrot-related plants from central Asia, this curious version of Asafoetida finds greater favour amongst cooks than patients for the smooth onion-like flavour it bestows with generous grace to any dish to which it is added.

 

The village boasts a branch of Durdans Laboratories whose range of basic medical tests often saves a longer journey to the leading hospitals in Peradeniya.  The chain began in 1945 and is one of several leading private health care providers, such as Lanka Hospital and Asiri.

 

The village, being about 40% Muslim, naturally boasts its own mosque, this one a large white and green structure, whose Imman’s call to prayer, a welcome musical improvement on the previous incumbent, can be heard daily across the jungle.

 

Sri Lanka has well over 1 million tuk-tuks on its register, so it is no surprise to find several 3-wheel garages in the village, one of the better ones being New Chooti Motor Centre.  Most tuk-tuk drivers are careful and law-abiding souls; even so, the vehicles account for almost 4,000 road incidents annually, nearly 8% of them fatal.

 

As the row of shops thins out on the left, you pass the Government Vet, their animal mandate including the usual tally of cats and dogs, but also sizable numbers of goats and some 100 weekly out calls for cows.

 

Nearby is the Hanna Gold Shop, one of several tiny gold shops in the village, whose products are typically 22 carats or less. It lies close to a significant Village Sports ground - usually silent and locked except on those days when politicians come to town, eager for large rallies, or for very occasional music performances or even sports tournaments. 

 

Most of the main political parties have a few branch offices in Galagedera, and the village tends to be a swing constituency, typically voting for whichever party wins that year's election.

 

Beyond the sport’s ground, the village peters out to paddy and the occasional house or roadside café. Still, on the other side of the road heading back into Galagedera, it starts up again, this time with the capacious Office of the Agricultural Instructor.  

 

Set up in 1935 and now staffed by 32 people, half of whom are field officers, they are part of a government network that provides practical support to small farmers, with subsidised sales of plants and fertiliser, water provision and horticultural advice for the main commercial crops – rice, pepper, cardamom, coconut, clovers, cinnamon and rubber.  Financial advice is also on hand, with a branch of the Agricultural Bank set up on its grounds, as well as the help of a more spiritual nature, provided by the not insignificant shrine to Lord Buddha that greets you on your arrival.

 

Along from here is the Jabbar Central College, a mixed-gender Muslim school and a branch of Lanka Petrel, a filling station with reasonably non-rusty tanks and reliable petrol. 

 

The almost-next-door B&B Bake House is another of the village’s treasures.  For over 20 years, it has turned out over 350 loaves and 1000 other assorted muffins, cakes, buns, and sweet eats twice daily, in time for the early morning rush and the end-of-day homecoming.

 

Another near and treasured is Kandurata Spice, one of 3 spice shops in the village. This one has been running for over 40 years and is now in its second generation of family owners, sourcing its crops from local farmers.  Alongside very well-graded quantities of nutmeg, mace, clove, cinnamon, cardamom and pepper, it also sells rubber sheets, areca nuts and, unaccountably, brooms. 

 

Dried fish - especially sprats, skipjack tuna, shark, sardines, and queen fish - is a staple in the Sri Lankan diet and is found in the most unexpected of dishes.  Smoking gives the meat a pleasing flavour, colour, and taste; more importantly, it provides consumers with a more affordable source of animal protein.  

 

Many shops sell it in the village, including the popular Fish Bar, which is next to the One Up Shoe Shop, whose tagline (“The Best Footwear”) well reflects its extensive range of trainers and chappals. Rush Mobile, just on for here, is probably the best phone shop in the village, and though they don’t repair phones, they do sell many accessories.

 

A busy printer, Chandena Offset, is also here, with an office equipped with sophisticated production capacity for designing and printing on paper, wood, plastic, or resin.  Stopping by at almost any time of the day and seeing a continual flow of customers eager to get adverts printed for poppadams, Muslim delicacies, fliers for shop launches, wedding invitations, and CVs.  Always, lots of XCVS.  

 

There is a range of barber shops and beauty salons in the village, though you can’t really beat arranging for Dilruk to come to cut your hair on site at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel under the frangipani trees.  

 

Several foreign employment agencies also have tiny branches in the village.  In just six (albeit turbulent) years from 2019, 1.3 million Sri Lankans have left the country to work abroad – nearly 6% of the entire island population.  The paperwork for leaving, still less getting a job, is a torturous process. Although the greater number end up in the Gulf States, many Western agencies, such as the UK’s NHS, have become dependent on appropriating foreign talent.

 

The branches of several large nationwide banks can be found in the village, the Bank of Ceylon, with its Soviet-style service; the People’s Bank and the NSB.  All have ATMs and, even better, air conditioning.

 

A busy mini retail park of 5 shops in a row also lies on this side of the road, all owned and managed by relatives of Priyanka, our go-to guy for hotel shopping, whose range of aphoristic T-shirts provokes daily comment.  

 

The shops include the village’s leading religious shop.  Although the odd statue of Ganesh can be spotted, its stock is primarily Buddhist.  

 

Statues of Lord Buddha in cement, plaster of Paris, stone, fibreglass, and ceramic fill every ledge and floor space, along with religious paintings and items that worshipers can buy to gift to the monk: robes, pillows, sheets, and ceremonial yellow sun umbrellas.  It also sells a range of religious accessories, including fly whisks, incense, bells, oil lamps, walking sticks and even electric lights in the shape of the sacred Bo Tree.

 

The village supports a tiny branch of Cargills, an outpost of the island’s oldest supermarket chain, which began life in 1844 with branches in Kandy and Galle before opening its iconic main branch on the site of the old Governor General’s palace in Colombo in 1902.  

 

This red and white brick structure was designed by the Scottish architect James Skinner, father of many of the island’s most significant buildings, who hanged himself at his offices in Colombo Fort on 26 December 1910, having never recovered from an earlier bicycling accident.

 

Just around the corner is Super Meds Central Pharmacy, owned and run by Harsha for over 10 years, which can source most medicines.  Opposite is the Post Office, a large building with 32 staff who collect and redistribute thousands of letters and parcels daily across the Galagedera region.  Here, too, people pay utility bills, make money orders, and even send telegrams.

 

Up from here is the village’s Pradeshiya Sabha, one of 276 across the island. These local councils are where many public services are accessed and governed – including the management of public spaces, roads, sanitation, and water supply; public health and safety; the collection of local revenue; the implementation of regional development plans; and the enforcement of by-laws and planning regulations.

 

Should you then wander past the entrance to The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, heading along the main road to Kandy, you encounter two plush cafes.  The Royal Lion Hotel, the first of these, also offers rooms.  

 

Further along is Café OMeili, set up and managed by Srimal, a stylish and enterprising ex-banker with a sideline in hill country strawberries.  His air-conditioned, beautifully designed premises sell a wide range of coffees, teas, soft drinks, and made-on-site snacks that would put most coffee shops in London or New York to shame.  

 

Going up the hill, you take you to the nearest liquor shop, which, like all shops of this kind, goes by the name Wine Shop.  Selling any liquor here demands of its retailer such quantities of patience as would trouble the dead.  

 

The types of licence offered by the Excise Department are many and varied, and are often given for small, random changes, suspensions, or adaptations.  Further licences are required for different types of alcohol.  And still more for its storage, importation, and distribution, still less for its importation. Its fees are no less of a minefield, and of course, there are strict rules about when, be it the hour or the day, that liquor can be sold.

 

But beyond the village of Galagedera, deep in its forested and paddy hinterland, lies a remarkable tour that steps off the tourist path to give you a glimpse of what really makes Sri Lanka tick. 

 

Sacred temples, royal palaces, leopards, tea tasting, ancient frescos, sandy beaches, gourmet curries, tamarind martinis, whale watching, trekking, turtle fostering – these are the things that most visitors to Sri Lanka typically get up to.

 

And they are lovely: very lovely. Well worth doing. But there’s more. Much more. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was perfect,” noted Moses with satisfaction in Genesis, and he must surely have had Sri Lanka in mind. Because what is special – most beautiful of all – is its ordinary life. The life you notice while driving its roads or walking its streets. 

 

And it is all that enables this life that is the subject of this little, most local of tours, a tuk tuk drive from Sri Lanka’s jungle retreat, The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This journey will take you behind the door of what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lanka – those aspects of life that matter most to most people: god, food, water, culture, education, crafts, and local lords. These are the things that motor this little Sri Lankan community, perched in the jungle and paddy on the edge of the highlands, as it does most others. As Bad Bunny, the rapper, said, “Simple goes a long way.”  Especially here, far from the busy world. 

 

History has the hardest of times being heard in a tropical climate, which is no respecter of artefacts. Much has been lost. The haunting story of Dingiri Menika in Galagedera exemplifies this—the fate of this renowned local beauty is intertwined with that of Kandy’s last king. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of the last King of Kandy, Queen Dingiri Menika was kidnapped by his soldiers, garlanded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake atop Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, now home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. 

 

Bound to a stake, she was meant to be a human sacrifice, though quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first, rescued her, married her, in fact, and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years, he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of whom was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees. Traces of the king remain in the museum in Kandy, but of the Galagedera home that housed his beautiful would-be sacrifice, there is none.

 

Yet the world she inhabited is not yet gone, and this tour will try to pick out which aspects of it still live on. We will visit Mrs Liyange and the tiny preschool class of tiny singing children at the ancient monastic school of Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. And Manju and his family beside their paddy fields and figure out all that happens to our sticky rice pudding before it gets to be anything of the sort. We will find inscriptions so ancient they predate recorded Sri Lankan history with a script that fell out of use nearly two thousand years ago, when we call in on Gunadaha Rajamaha. This cave altar was the refuge of a king who symbolised the enduring and unique culture of the Sinhala nation that is Sri Lanka today, and who rescued the young Anuradhapura Kingdom.  On route to a handloom workshop and a woodcarver, part of a great artistic tradition for which the Kandyan kingdom is famed. And an abandoned manor house dating back to the first years of British occupation. 

 

 

2

THE KING’S HIDING PLACE

 

Hidden down tiny roads very close to the hotel is the ancient cave temple of Gunadaha Rajamaha, its lofty views and deep forest hinterland once home to one of Sri Lanka's most unlucky kings. Valagamba became King of Anuradhapura in 103 BCE, but had first to kill Kammaharattaka, his sibling’s murderer and chief general, before gaining what he regarded as his birthright - the crown.

 

This he did, but little good came of it. Decades earlier, royal misrule had set the grand old kingdom of Anuradhapura on a path to utter disaster. Within months of taking power, a rebellion broke out in Rohana due to a devastating drought. The kingdom’s preeminent port, Mantota, across the Mannar Strait, fell to Dravidian Tamil invaders. And at a battle at Kolambalaka, the hapless King Valagamba was defeated, racing from the battlefield in a chariot lightened by the (accidental?) exit of his wife, Queen Somadevi. 

 

The king went into continual hiding - including here in Galagedera as he sought to build a guerrilla resistance to the invaders. His kingdom was now ruled by a series of Tamil kings who, between 103 BCE and 89 BCE, were either to murder one another or fall victim to the guerrilla campaign that had now become ex-king Valagamba’s passion and priority. 

 

For 10 years of war, regicide, and rebellion cripped the land. The first three Tamil kings murdered one another, and Valagamba’s successful guerrilla campaign killed the final two.

 

By 89 BCE, he had recaptured the throne/. He was to rule for a further 12 years, but his religious preoccupations, perhaps magnified by his long periods of hiding out in temple caves, set in motion the island’s first Buddhist schism.

 

Over the following hundreds of years, the ancient little temple carried on; its caves gathering statues; its forest getting ever denser; and the walls of the rock within which it hides being chiselled with medieval drains to fend off the monsoon. 

 

Today it remains a place for solitude and prayer; a moment of stillness to carry with you, the lintel above the cave itself inscribed with a pre-Singhalese script – Brahmi, an alphabet that dates back to the 6th BCE in India.

 

 

3

TEMPLE, SCHOOL, MUSEUM, PEACE

 

A temple of a quite different sort is next on the tour. 

 

There is no agreed word to describe a hunger for temples, but any such human condition is most easily put to rest in Sri Lanka, the island that averages a temple or kovil every three miles or so. Ancient, famous, revered, enormous, historic, picking out just one to especially favour is no easy task. But the one I would pick out, for its abiding spirit of serenity, its simple good work, its connection to its community, and its halcyon calm, is Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. 

 

Found off a tiny back road just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, the temple is around 400 years old, dating back to King Rajasinha II, the collapse of the Portuguese occupation of the island, and the arrival of the Dutch.

 

Within its grounds lie a lovely elongated mini stupa, over 100 years old; a dormitory for its monks; ponds of koi carp, a range of Buddhist alters; a Museum; public rooms for workshops and eating; a medical facility; and the ancient temple itself.

 

It is overseen by Udawela Nanda Thero, whose kind and thoughtful character is almost all the argument you need to believe in the goodness of God. Half a century old, his family have presided over the temple since its earliest beginnings. Someone once said that anyone who loves books, dogs, and trees cannot be faulted for their essential goodness. And so it is here. Udawela Nanda Thero goes about his daily work, followed by his three adoring dogs, who take but a passing interest in the gentle stream of locals who come to pay their respects, touch his feet, and receive a blessing in return.  Trees shade its grounds and books, and scrolls fill its library.

 

The temple is as much a practical expression of care as it is a spiritual one. The medical facility here opens on weekends and focuses on the needs of women and children. The temple school, which operates from 8 am to 12 noon, looks after about 30 local children aged 3 to 5. Its head teacher, Mrs Liyange, has been at her work here for 18 years, supported by a couple of assistants. The children, at this age, of course, learn by play; and the class includes those few children who present disabilities, so that at the very earliest of ages, no child, whatever their ability, is alienated from the other. There are several respected schools in Galagedera for children to move on to as they grow older, but it would be hard to beat this pastoral kindergarten start.

 

The temple itself is a marvel of carvings and paintings. The central enclosed sanctum is covered in ancient Buddhist frescos and sits inside a vast, cool veranda whose roof extends to enclose the sanctum's outer walls. Frescos of varying ages tell their morality stories across these walls. The entrance to the sanctum itself is guarded by wood carvings that date to the building’s inception: carved lions, life-size statues of characters from the Buddhist scriptures, horses, wild animals, mystical beasts, and tableaus of noted Buddhist stories. Beside the temple sits the stupa, solid as with all stupas, but containing – what? Something, for sure, as all stupas have at their heart some relic or memory that has a special historic resonance. What lies at the heart of this one is now lost to memory. 

 

Over 5 decades, Udawela Nanda Thero has assembled a singular museum that tells, with subtle eloquence, the story of Sri Lanka’s journey from an agrarian world to a more urban one. A great range of antique agricultural implements adorn its walls and shelves. Hand-carved coconut scrapers; little metal containers that fit together like Russian dolls, made to measure rice out in careful and agreed amounts; a paddy crusher; a vast 350-year-old Rice Safe, with an accompanying separate container made from an enormous single hollowed-out jack tree. 

 

Each item recalls not just a lost rustic world, long since overtaken by modern machines and equipment, but also a culture with rice at its centre, as befits an island that flourished from its very beginning because it was able to harness the transformative power of water—for to achieve anything more than a rudimentary agricultural existence required the availability of year-long water, and plenty of it. Water, after all, permitted greater areas to be used for growing crops and higher yield densities. It meant food surplus, profit, trade - and with it the capacity to develop an urban and industrial capability, underwritten by technical advances from construction and weaponry to horticulture, and transport. It meant that the state could better develop the organisational and professional skills essential to its success – commerce, industry, engineering, labour, planning, law, medicine, food storage, and finance. 

 

Water management, including irrigation, storage, collection, and distribution, made the original Anuradhapuran Kingdom possible in the first place. These early Sri Lankans mastered the construction of small tanks before the fifth century BCE - the start of what is called the Tank Cascade system that developed into the construction of low embankments across valleys to dam small rivers or rivulets that would deposit their water into a series of downstream tanks, and, ultimately, paddy fields. A profoundly detailed understanding of how to refine and improve the technical requirements to maximise water availability has been developed. Inceptor zones were created between the tank and the paddy fields. Plants with well-developed root systems were used to help absorb the salts and heavy metals from the water before it reached the paddy. Tree belts were planted well above the water tanks to stop wind, waves, and evaporation. Sedges purified water run-off. Catchment forests regularise water supply to tanks during the dry season. Miniature tanks captured silt that would otherwise run into the tanks.

 

In this part of the country, where the dry plains meet the hills, agriculture is a beguiling mix of what works best in both zones - rice paddy and spice plantations; timber forests and orchards; rubber, vegetables, and coconut. The droughts that plague the dry zone are mitigated here in the wetter hill country. In Galagedera, small rivers like Kospotu Oya or Iriyyagahadeniye Ela, fed by a thousand smaller streams, ensure that, whatever the season, the waters still flow. And flow, of course, ultimately to feed the very paddy land whose ancient machinery, unchanged since the time of the Anuradhapuran kings, has been collected and displayed by Udawela Nanda Thero in his unique temple museum.

 

But they are not alone. Other artefacts dot the museum’s walls: a medicinal boat and crusher for creating traditional medicines, a great wooden box made by the Portuguese to hold guns; a simple school slate and stylus, the laptops of its day; a paan crusher, the jingling bangles worn by Kandyan dancers; weapons and daggers that go back to the last kings.  And, perhaps most poignant of all, some of the very first examples of the modern world that have so eroded this one: an ancient typewriter; a bakerite phone; a vintage cine film camera; a massive iron fuelled by hot coals.

 

 

4

HAPPY RICE. HAPPY LIFE

 

Rice, in one form or another, exists at the centre of most things in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankans consume an average of 11 kilos of curries, kothu roti, lamprais, hoppers, kiribath, and sweet puddings each month. And although healthier red rice varieties command more favour here than in most other countries, the country once supported over 2000 different strains, including heirloom varieties like Suwandel, Maa-Wee, and the dark Kalu Heenati (considered something of an aphrodisiac), which are now making a modest comeback.

 

The crop is planted in two seasons per year: the Maha (bigger) season from September to March, fed by the NE monsoon; and the Yala (smaller) season from May to August. Its cultivation, though improved by mechanisation and disease-resistant varieties, remains elaborate. 

 

The overall paddy track, or Kumburuyaya, is subdivided into smaller plots – liyadi - around which ridges (niyara) are made, pierced by vakkadas to let water in. Often, small areas are left wild to feed the birds that might otherwise eat the paddy. Harrowing or preparing the land, once done by ploughs and oxen, is now mechanised. The land is levelled and seeds, often pregerminated, sown across the watery track – the water itself is typically kept at around 5 cm above the soil. Then the wedding begins. And never stops: patience was ever a virtue best exhibited by rice farmers.

 

Harvesting is usually a manual process, followed rapidly by drying, storage, and milling; rapid drying is the most critical step. Many people juggle regular jobs with maintaining small pieces of family paddy, tucking their farming work into off-time and weekends, and enlisting family members to help out. And this is just what Maju, our supervisor and butler, does with his piece of family paddy near the estate. The paddy is fed by one of the district’s main streams – the Kospotu Oya, which flows even during the driest of dry seasons.

 

Together with his wife, Shyamalee, our head housekeeper, and his sons, the paddy is carefully managed. It lies just below the compound where his mother and other family members live – his sister, brother, uncle, aunt, and nephews - and the immediate garden around their houses, shaded by mango trees. Surrounded by his neighbours' plots and encircled by forest and hamlets, it is a perfect picture of authentic country life. And a good place to come to see the crop up close and contemplate its singular importance on the island.

 

 

4

HANDMADE

 

The modern world has not been especially kind to the craft folk of the island. You have to go deep into the countryside to find genuine examples of craftwork. But every so often, as you travel the island, you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There’s one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. In Pilimathalawa, just eleven miles from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, is one dedicated to brass and copper.

 

Two other examples exist just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. The first, a woodcarving workshop, is run by Mahinda Jayalath, who has been carving for 30 years. Born into a family some distance from the village, he moved here with his wife's enthusiastic encouragement, who is a local. His workshop is arrestingly modest – a mere covered shelter off a tiny back road where he and his three workers sit making their carvings. His work sits within a most ancient and celebrated Kandyan tradition, for it was here, in the Kandyan kingdom, that the island produced one of its most significant and most forgotten artists - Delmada Devendra Mulachari. Many people will have heard of Grinling Gibbons, the Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II, with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal. But at almost the same time, his equal by any measure was busy doing much the same in Sri Lanka. 

 

Mulachari is renowned for many things, but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale, a 16-mile drive from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A medieval masterpiece, the temple has withstood wars, weather, and, most especially, the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom, in nearby Kandy. By the 1750s, it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari, who lived nearby, his family, one of several Singhala artists from the South, having come north to seek work. Wood carver, sculptor, architect, artist, Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy, especially for King Kirthi Sri Rajasinha, whose 35-year reign, to 1782, was preoccupied with restoring the hundreds of Buddhist temples destroyed in the colonial wars. In this, the king was greatly helped by Mulachari, who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake.

 

Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. But although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry. The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By compassion, at Embekke Devale, you enter a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest part. In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a masterpiece in itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breastfeeding children, double-headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers, and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world-class carvings. But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a woman; a bird assumes human attributes; a sleight of hand reveals that an elephant is a bull; another, that a lion.

 

Today, the demand for wood carvings is for doors and windows, fretwork above doors, statues of Lord Buddha, and the odd elephant or cobra for the tourist market. All this, and more, is what Mahinda Jayalath and his tiny team put out. Should you be around for more than two or 3 days, he is more than likely to have enough time to make any special commission.

 

A few kilometres on from his is another small example of fine craftsmanship – this one dedicated to handloom fabrics. This unexpected outpost of the Department of Textiles has at its heart some six ancient wooden hand looms on which women weave all manner of classic patterns in cotton. A shop next to it sells some of its wares: sarongs and lungis, saris, table mats, and bed linen.

 

 

 

5

ABANDONED MANSIONS

 

Sri Lanka is littered with ancient mansions and walawwas, some like palaces, others modest as country mice. They were once the homes, ancient or merely old, of the ruling class, a class not always popular in a democratic socialist republic. They pop up in city centres, down dusty town roads, in jungles, on plantations, amidst paddy, on mountain tops, and off country roads.

 

Many – if not most –are in a state of severe neglect; a few have been declared national monuments and attract basic survival care; fewer still - such as The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel - have been reimagined as shops, hotels, museums, their future blessed by round-the-clock maintenance.

 

One such haunting building – The Paranagama Walawwa - lies within a tuk-tuk ride of the hotel, now abandoned and dating back to 1820, a remarkably early date given that the British only signed the Kandyan Convention in 1815, bringing to an end the last independent kingdom in the country and the one that ruled over Galagedera at the time.

 

Just two years before this mansion was built, the Great Rebellion of 1817–1818 broke out, initiated by frustrated Kandyan chiefs disillusioned with the British colonial administration. The rebellion, now known as the Great Liberation War, was led by the celebrated freedom fighter Keppetipola Disawe, but other leaders did not support him. The British Governor Brownrigg came up from Colombo and established his field headquarters at Kandy to direct military operations against the rebels, backed by extra troops rushed in from British India. His more trained manpower eventually won the day, and the rebellion was crushed.

 

Keppetipola was taken to Kandy, where he was tried for high treason and sentenced to death by beheading. Bizarrely, his skull was brought to Britain and placed in the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh. When Ceylon gained independence from the British in 1948, Keppetipola was declared a national hero. In 1954, he was returned home and entombed in the Keppetipola Memorial in Kandy, next to the Temple of the Tooth. Brownrigg himself is alleged to have later stolen the priceless, gilded bronze ancient Statue of Tara, now at the centre of a dispute with the British Museum, where it currently resides.

 

In the two years following the end of the Rebellion and the erecting of this Galagedera mansion, the surrounding countryside, even more remote then than it is today, would have been reeling from the devastating effects of Britain’s scorched earth policy in the area – the killing of cattle and livestock, the destruction of private property and stocks of salt; the burning of rice paddy and confiscation of properties.  Herbert White, a British agent, wrote of the situation a few years after 1818: “If thousands died in the battle, they were all fearless and clever fighters. If one considers the remaining population of 4/5 after the battle to be children, women, and the aged, the havoc caused is unlimited. In short, the people have lost their lives and all other valuable belongings. It is doubtful whether Uva has at least now recovered from the catastrophe.”

 

Little is known about the mansion, which is thought to have been built by J R Paranagama, the Dissawa (Governor of Uva) within the old Kandyan aristocratic hierarchy, and a Mudaliyar at the Kandy Kachcheri – the district secretariat. Many of the succeeding family members became notable lawyers in the country and around Kandy. Today, the mansion lies under the lightest of care from the Archaeological Department, which has nevertheless put on a new roof and rectified some of the most significant erosion that would otherwise have led to the collapse of the entire building.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

That was a production from The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.

 

The complete list of podcast series from The Ceylon Press includes:

 

1.           The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka

2.           Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast

3.           Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

4.           Poetry From The Jungle

5.           The Jungle Diaries

6.           The Archaeologies Diaries

What is Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka?

The Ceylon Press' Complete Audio Books tell the stories of some of Sri Lanka's most remarkable people, places and events.

Welcome to The Visitor’s Guide to Galagedera, a Ceylon Press Complete Audio Book.

This audiobook is written by David Swarbrick and was published in 2025. It is copyrighted 2025 by The Ceylon Press.

Although the book itself is given over to exploring and celebrating Galagedera and its hinterland, it is also dedicated to Chinta, marvellous, calm and caring, who worked for many years at the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel; whose smile could transform the bleakest of days and whose death came far before its proper time.

And we start with a little bit of retail theory, which will take you down one of the world’s busiest high streets.

And if you wonder about the example chosen – which you may, at first glance, consider eccentric, situated as it is in small village in the middle of an island of barely 20 million people in one of the least visited countries in the world; marvel instead - because, yes, you have come to Galagedera, the first highland village you encounter as you drive from the immense dry plains of northern Sri Lankan into the Central Highlands.

Here, at 1,000 feet, the Galagedera Gap stretches out, where in 1765 the Dutch Army were defeated by soldiers of the Kandyan king. Stones rolled down onto the army from the adjacent hill. The Dutch sued for peace, returned to Colombo, and accepted defeat.

Despite its obscurity, Galagedera’s high street, like those of most Sri Lankan towns and villages, is booming. As the retail apocalypse decimates the high streets of the developed world, here the drive to digital, globalisation and changing consumer habits has made only the most modest of footprints. Within the next 30 years, this will surely change - but for now, to travel down its length in a tuk-tuk is like time-travelling in the Tardis. Once upon a time, your village looked a little like this.

The tour may shortchange you on art galleries, artisan food outlets or Jimmy Choo footwear wear; and there is little to no chance of breaking for a martini, still less an almond croissant – but no matter. Behind Galagedera’s busy frontages are nearly all the things that most people need most of the time: on their doorstep and not concealed behind knotty road networks in gloomy retail parks.

Galagedera High Street really is that - a long ribbon of a road, with almost 200 shops and businesses on either side, beginning on the left as you slip out of the gates of the Flame Tree Hotel and set off down the Rambukkana road.

At almost any time of the day, it brims with pedestrians and traffic – especially other tuk tuks. Pause and watch. People talk. They pause and gossip, trade news, and they know one another. Amidst innumerable clothes shops, tiny cafes, photographers with technicolour backdrops, fishmongers and butchers, woodcarvers and timber yards, small shops selling plastic chairs from China, water tanks, clothes, fruit and vegetables, and basic household goods, there is a wide range of businesses and services.

LEFT OUT OF THE GATES, and it is the hospital you arrive at first, an agreeable village example of the free and universal health care system enjoyed right across the country. Sri Lanka’s health system has had a seismic impact on national life, improving life expectancy and dramatically reducing maternal and infant deaths. It runs parallel to paid-for private health care, offering faster and sometimes more advanced treatment. And it co-exists with an indigenous medicine system supported by its own network of doctors and nurses, pharmacies, hospitals, teaching colleges, and a bespoke government ministry.

Galagedera’s cottage hospital treats around 300 outpatients a day and admits around 20 patients to its wards, cared for by around five doctors and 40 nurses. Dental care, basic health care, basic mental health care, and maternity care are all provided, but more complex cases and conditions are referred to the central state hospital in Kandy.

This includes, on average, 10 snake bites per year, but not scorpion bites, which can be treated locally. Colds, flu, and road accidents are all typical of its challenges – but so too are people injured by falling off trees or being hit by falling coconuts.

Next up is the village’s central bus station, which receives buses to and from Kandy or Kurunegala throughout the day. Notaries have their offices here, close to the village Magistrate's Court, one of over 5,000 such government offices nationwide, and a short walk from the village’s large police office, one of 600 nationwide.

Close at hand, and convenient for a tidy court appearance, is the village’s tiny handloom workshop: authentic looms being worked by real people to produce lovely, patterned fabric.

Further along is the Galagedera Primary School and the Sujatha Girls School. Founded in 1906, this is the only girls' school in the area, teaching around 1,000 pupils from first grade on.

The village’s primary school, Galagedera Central College, is tucked away behind the town. Founded over 120 years ago, this large state school takes in students aged 10 to 18, with about 70 staff members educating 1,000 students.

For hardcore consumers, a retail treat comes next with The Global Electrics and Paint Shop, owned by one of 3 brothers, the hardware tycoons of the village. The second brother trades in items such as cement, plumbing, and electrics, and the third in glass. They are a second-generation business family, with the enterprise having started 40 years earlier.

Their somewhat surprising neighbour is Green Life, a plantation investment company that specialises in guavas.

Given that the fruit, delicious in jams, desserts, and chutneys, originated in South America but has been used in traditional Sri Lankan medicine for hundreds of years, it likely arrived sometime after 1505 with the Portuguese. Guavas are grown mainly in the dry zone, not in the hill country of Galagedera, so this anomaly of an office is a rare and mysterious thing, as much to me as to its manager.

Then you encounter one of the village’s great retail treasures: the Ayurveda Medicine Shop. Once little larger than a wardrobe, this enterprise has ballooned over the past 8 years and sells over 100 different pungent herbs, made up to whatever prescription the customer presents.

Amongst its many wonders is devil’s dung. Made from the dried latex of carrot-related plants from central Asia, this curious version of Asafoetida finds greater favour amongst cooks than patients for the smooth onion-like flavour it bestows with generous grace to any dish to which it is added.

The village boasts a branch of Durdans Laboratories whose range of basic medical tests often saves a longer journey to the leading hospitals in Peradeniya. The chain began in 1945 and is one of several leading private health care providers, such as Lanka Hospital and Asiri.

The village, being about 40% Muslim, naturally boasts its own mosque, this one a large white and green structure, whose Imman’s call to prayer, a welcome musical improvement on the previous incumbent, can be heard daily across the jungle.

Sri Lanka has well over 1 million tuk-tuks on its register, so it is no surprise to find several 3-wheel garages in the village, one of the better ones being New Chooti Motor Centre. Most tuk-tuk drivers are careful and law-abiding souls; even so, the vehicles account for almost 4,000 road incidents annually, nearly 8% of them fatal.

As the row of shops thins out on the left, you pass the Government Vet, their animal mandate including the usual tally of cats and dogs, but also sizable numbers of goats and some 100 weekly out calls for cows.

Nearby is the Hanna Gold Shop, one of several tiny gold shops in the village, whose products are typically 22 carats or less. It lies close to a significant Village Sports ground - usually silent and locked except on those days when politicians come to town, eager for large rallies, or for very occasional music performances or even sports tournaments.

Most of the main political parties have a few branch offices in Galagedera, and the village tends to be a swing constituency, typically voting for whichever party wins that year's election.

Beyond the sport’s ground, the village peters out to paddy and the occasional house or roadside café. Still, on the other side of the road heading back into Galagedera, it starts up again, this time with the capacious Office of the Agricultural Instructor.

Set up in 1935 and now staffed by 32 people, half of whom are field officers, they are part of a government network that provides practical support to small farmers, with subsidised sales of plants and fertiliser, water provision and horticultural advice for the main commercial crops – rice, pepper, cardamom, coconut, clovers, cinnamon and rubber. Financial advice is also on hand, with a branch of the Agricultural Bank set up on its grounds, as well as the help of a more spiritual nature, provided by the not insignificant shrine to Lord Buddha that greets you on your arrival.

Along from here is the Jabbar Central College, a mixed-gender Muslim school and a branch of Lanka Petrel, a filling station with reasonably non-rusty tanks and reliable petrol.

The almost-next-door B&B Bake House is another of the village’s treasures. For over 20 years, it has turned out over 350 loaves and 1000 other assorted muffins, cakes, buns, and sweet eats twice daily, in time for the early morning rush and the end-of-day homecoming.

Another near and treasured is Kandurata Spice, one of 3 spice shops in the village. This one has been running for over 40 years and is now in its second generation of family owners, sourcing its crops from local farmers. Alongside very well-graded quantities of nutmeg, mace, clove, cinnamon, cardamom and pepper, it also sells rubber sheets, areca nuts and, unaccountably, brooms.

Dried fish - especially sprats, skipjack tuna, shark, sardines, and queen fish - is a staple in the Sri Lankan diet and is found in the most unexpected of dishes. Smoking gives the meat a pleasing flavour, colour, and taste; more importantly, it provides consumers with a more affordable source of animal protein.

Many shops sell it in the village, including the popular Fish Bar, which is next to the One Up Shoe Shop, whose tagline (“The Best Footwear”) well reflects its extensive range of trainers and chappals. Rush Mobile, just on for here, is probably the best phone shop in the village, and though they don’t repair phones, they do sell many accessories.

A busy printer, Chandena Offset, is also here, with an office equipped with sophisticated production capacity for designing and printing on paper, wood, plastic, or resin. Stopping by at almost any time of the day and seeing a continual flow of customers eager to get adverts printed for poppadams, Muslim delicacies, fliers for shop launches, wedding invitations, and CVs. Always, lots of XCVS.

There is a range of barber shops and beauty salons in the village, though you can’t really beat arranging for Dilruk to come to cut your hair on site at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel under the frangipani trees.

Several foreign employment agencies also have tiny branches in the village. In just six (albeit turbulent) years from 2019, 1.3 million Sri Lankans have left the country to work abroad – nearly 6% of the entire island population. The paperwork for leaving, still less getting a job, is a torturous process. Although the greater number end up in the Gulf States, many Western agencies, such as the UK’s NHS, have become dependent on appropriating foreign talent.

The branches of several large nationwide banks can be found in the village, the Bank of Ceylon, with its Soviet-style service; the People’s Bank and the NSB. All have ATMs and, even better, air conditioning.

A busy mini retail park of 5 shops in a row also lies on this side of the road, all owned and managed by relatives of Priyanka, our go-to guy for hotel shopping, whose range of aphoristic T-shirts provokes daily comment.

The shops include the village’s leading religious shop. Although the odd statue of Ganesh can be spotted, its stock is primarily Buddhist.

Statues of Lord Buddha in cement, plaster of Paris, stone, fibreglass, and ceramic fill every ledge and floor space, along with religious paintings and items that worshipers can buy to gift to the monk: robes, pillows, sheets, and ceremonial yellow sun umbrellas. It also sells a range of religious accessories, including fly whisks, incense, bells, oil lamps, walking sticks and even electric lights in the shape of the sacred Bo Tree.

The village supports a tiny branch of Cargills, an outpost of the island’s oldest supermarket chain, which began life in 1844 with branches in Kandy and Galle before opening its iconic main branch on the site of the old Governor General’s palace in Colombo in 1902.

This red and white brick structure was designed by the Scottish architect James Skinner, father of many of the island’s most significant buildings, who hanged himself at his offices in Colombo Fort on 26 December 1910, having never recovered from an earlier bicycling accident.

Just around the corner is Super Meds Central Pharmacy, owned and run by Harsha for over 10 years, which can source most medicines. Opposite is the Post Office, a large building with 32 staff who collect and redistribute thousands of letters and parcels daily across the Galagedera region. Here, too, people pay utility bills, make money orders, and even send telegrams.

Up from here is the village’s Pradeshiya Sabha, one of 276 across the island. These local councils are where many public services are accessed and governed – including the management of public spaces, roads, sanitation, and water supply; public health and safety; the collection of local revenue; the implementation of regional development plans; and the enforcement of by-laws and planning regulations.

Should you then wander past the entrance to The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, heading along the main road to Kandy, you encounter two plush cafes. The Royal Lion Hotel, the first of these, also offers rooms.

Further along is Café OMeili, set up and managed by Srimal, a stylish and enterprising ex-banker with a sideline in hill country strawberries. His air-conditioned, beautifully designed premises sell a wide range of coffees, teas, soft drinks, and made-on-site snacks that would put most coffee shops in London or New York to shame.

Going up the hill, you take you to the nearest liquor shop, which, like all shops of this kind, goes by the name Wine Shop. Selling any liquor here demands of its retailer such quantities of patience as would trouble the dead.

The types of licence offered by the Excise Department are many and varied, and are often given for small, random changes, suspensions, or adaptations. Further licences are required for different types of alcohol. And still more for its storage, importation, and distribution, still less for its importation. Its fees are no less of a minefield, and of course, there are strict rules about when, be it the hour or the day, that liquor can be sold.

But beyond the village of Galagedera, deep in its forested and paddy hinterland, lies a remarkable tour that steps off the tourist path to give you a glimpse of what really makes Sri Lanka tick.

Sacred temples, royal palaces, leopards, tea tasting, ancient frescos, sandy beaches, gourmet curries, tamarind martinis, whale watching, trekking, turtle fostering – these are the things that most visitors to Sri Lanka typically get up to.

And they are lovely: very lovely. Well worth doing. But there’s more. Much more. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was perfect,” noted Moses with satisfaction in Genesis, and he must surely have had Sri Lanka in mind. Because what is special – most beautiful of all – is its ordinary life. The life you notice while driving its roads or walking its streets.

And it is all that enables this life that is the subject of this little, most local of tours, a tuk tuk drive from Sri Lanka’s jungle retreat, The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. This journey will take you behind the door of what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lanka – those aspects of life that matter most to most people: god, food, water, culture, education, crafts, and local lords. These are the things that motor this little Sri Lankan community, perched in the jungle and paddy on the edge of the highlands, as it does most others. As Bad Bunny, the rapper, said, “Simple goes a long way.” Especially here, far from the busy world.

History has the hardest of times being heard in a tropical climate, which is no respecter of artefacts. Much has been lost. The haunting story of Dingiri Menika in Galagedera exemplifies this—the fate of this renowned local beauty is intertwined with that of Kandy’s last king. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of the last King of Kandy, Queen Dingiri Menika was kidnapped by his soldiers, garlanded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake atop Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, now home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha.

Bound to a stake, she was meant to be a human sacrifice, though quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first, rescued her, married her, in fact, and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, in Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years, he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of whom was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees. Traces of the king remain in the museum in Kandy, but of the Galagedera home that housed his beautiful would-be sacrifice, there is none.

Yet the world she inhabited is not yet gone, and this tour will try to pick out which aspects of it still live on. We will visit Mrs Liyange and the tiny preschool class of tiny singing children at the ancient monastic school of Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya. And Manju and his family beside their paddy fields and figure out all that happens to our sticky rice pudding before it gets to be anything of the sort. We will find inscriptions so ancient they predate recorded Sri Lankan history with a script that fell out of use nearly two thousand years ago, when we call in on Gunadaha Rajamaha. This cave altar was the refuge of a king who symbolised the enduring and unique culture of the Sinhala nation that is Sri Lanka today, and who rescued the young Anuradhapura Kingdom. On route to a handloom workshop and a woodcarver, part of a great artistic tradition for which the Kandyan kingdom is famed. And an abandoned manor house dating back to the first years of British occupation.

THE KING’S HIDING PLACE

Hidden down tiny roads very close to the hotel is the ancient cave temple of Gunadaha Rajamaha, its lofty views and deep forest hinterland once home to one of Sri Lanka's most unlucky kings. Valagamba became King of Anuradhapura in 103 BCE, but had first to kill Kammaharattaka, his sibling’s murderer and chief general, before gaining what he regarded as his birthright - the crown.

This he did, but little good came of it. Decades earlier, royal misrule had set the grand old kingdom of Anuradhapura on a path to utter disaster. Within months of taking power, a rebellion broke out in Rohana due to a devastating drought. The kingdom’s preeminent port, Mantota, across the Mannar Strait, fell to Dravidian Tamil invaders. And at a battle at Kolambalaka, the hapless King Valagamba was defeated, racing from the battlefield in a chariot lightened by the (accidental?) exit of his wife, Queen Somadevi.

The king went into continual hiding - including here in Galagedera as he sought to build a guerrilla resistance to the invaders. His kingdom was now ruled by a series of Tamil kings who, between 103 BCE and 89 BCE, were either to murder one another or fall victim to the guerrilla campaign that had now become ex-king Valagamba’s passion and priority.

For 10 years of war, regicide, and rebellion cripped the land. The first three Tamil kings murdered one another, and Valagamba’s successful guerrilla campaign killed the final two.

By 89 BCE, he had recaptured the throne/. He was to rule for a further 12 years, but his religious preoccupations, perhaps magnified by his long periods of hiding out in temple caves, set in motion the island’s first Buddhist schism.

Over the following hundreds of years, the ancient little temple carried on; its caves gathering statues; its forest getting ever denser; and the walls of the rock within which it hides being chiselled with medieval drains to fend off the monsoon.

Today it remains a place for solitude and prayer; a moment of stillness to carry with you, the lintel above the cave itself inscribed with a pre-Singhalese script – Brahmi, an alphabet that dates back to the 6th BCE in India.

TEMPLE, SCHOOL, MUSEUM, PEACE

A temple of a quite different sort is next on the tour.

There is no agreed word to describe a hunger for temples, but any such human condition is most easily put to rest in Sri Lanka, the island that averages a temple or kovil every three miles or so. Ancient, famous, revered, enormous, historic, picking out just one to especially favour is no easy task. But the one I would pick out, for its abiding spirit of serenity, its simple good work, its connection to its community, and its halcyon calm, is Galayawe Sri Suvi Suddharamaya.

Found off a tiny back road just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, the temple is around 400 years old, dating back to King Rajasinha II, the collapse of the Portuguese occupation of the island, and the arrival of the Dutch.

Within its grounds lie a lovely elongated mini stupa, over 100 years old; a dormitory for its monks; ponds of koi carp, a range of Buddhist alters; a Museum; public rooms for workshops and eating; a medical facility; and the ancient temple itself.

It is overseen by Udawela Nanda Thero, whose kind and thoughtful character is almost all the argument you need to believe in the goodness of God. Half a century old, his family have presided over the temple since its earliest beginnings. Someone once said that anyone who loves books, dogs, and trees cannot be faulted for their essential goodness. And so it is here. Udawela Nanda Thero goes about his daily work, followed by his three adoring dogs, who take but a passing interest in the gentle stream of locals who come to pay their respects, touch his feet, and receive a blessing in return. Trees shade its grounds and books, and scrolls fill its library.

The temple is as much a practical expression of care as it is a spiritual one. The medical facility here opens on weekends and focuses on the needs of women and children. The temple school, which operates from 8 am to 12 noon, looks after about 30 local children aged 3 to 5. Its head teacher, Mrs Liyange, has been at her work here for 18 years, supported by a couple of assistants. The children, at this age, of course, learn by play; and the class includes those few children who present disabilities, so that at the very earliest of ages, no child, whatever their ability, is alienated from the other. There are several respected schools in Galagedera for children to move on to as they grow older, but it would be hard to beat this pastoral kindergarten start.

The temple itself is a marvel of carvings and paintings. The central enclosed sanctum is covered in ancient Buddhist frescos and sits inside a vast, cool veranda whose roof extends to enclose the sanctum's outer walls. Frescos of varying ages tell their morality stories across these walls. The entrance to the sanctum itself is guarded by wood carvings that date to the building’s inception: carved lions, life-size statues of characters from the Buddhist scriptures, horses, wild animals, mystical beasts, and tableaus of noted Buddhist stories. Beside the temple sits the stupa, solid as with all stupas, but containing – what? Something, for sure, as all stupas have at their heart some relic or memory that has a special historic resonance. What lies at the heart of this one is now lost to memory.

Over 5 decades, Udawela Nanda Thero has assembled a singular museum that tells, with subtle eloquence, the story of Sri Lanka’s journey from an agrarian world to a more urban one. A great range of antique agricultural implements adorn its walls and shelves. Hand-carved coconut scrapers; little metal containers that fit together like Russian dolls, made to measure rice out in careful and agreed amounts; a paddy crusher; a vast 350-year-old Rice Safe, with an accompanying separate container made from an enormous single hollowed-out jack tree.

Each item recalls not just a lost rustic world, long since overtaken by modern machines and equipment, but also a culture with rice at its centre, as befits an island that flourished from its very beginning because it was able to harness the transformative power of water—for to achieve anything more than a rudimentary agricultural existence required the availability of year-long water, and plenty of it. Water, after all, permitted greater areas to be used for growing crops and higher yield densities. It meant food surplus, profit, trade - and with it the capacity to develop an urban and industrial capability, underwritten by technical advances from construction and weaponry to horticulture, and transport. It meant that the state could better develop the organisational and professional skills essential to its success – commerce, industry, engineering, labour, planning, law, medicine, food storage, and finance.

Water management, including irrigation, storage, collection, and distribution, made the original Anuradhapuran Kingdom possible in the first place. These early Sri Lankans mastered the construction of small tanks before the fifth century BCE - the start of what is called the Tank Cascade system that developed into the construction of low embankments across valleys to dam small rivers or rivulets that would deposit their water into a series of downstream tanks, and, ultimately, paddy fields. A profoundly detailed understanding of how to refine and improve the technical requirements to maximise water availability has been developed. Inceptor zones were created between the tank and the paddy fields. Plants with well-developed root systems were used to help absorb the salts and heavy metals from the water before it reached the paddy. Tree belts were planted well above the water tanks to stop wind, waves, and evaporation. Sedges purified water run-off. Catchment forests regularise water supply to tanks during the dry season. Miniature tanks captured silt that would otherwise run into the tanks.

In this part of the country, where the dry plains meet the hills, agriculture is a beguiling mix of what works best in both zones - rice paddy and spice plantations; timber forests and orchards; rubber, vegetables, and coconut. The droughts that plague the dry zone are mitigated here in the wetter hill country. In Galagedera, small rivers like Kospotu Oya or Iriyyagahadeniye Ela, fed by a thousand smaller streams, ensure that, whatever the season, the waters still flow. And flow, of course, ultimately to feed the very paddy land whose ancient machinery, unchanged since the time of the Anuradhapuran kings, has been collected and displayed by Udawela Nanda Thero in his unique temple museum.

But they are not alone. Other artefacts dot the museum’s walls: a medicinal boat and crusher for creating traditional medicines, a great wooden box made by the Portuguese to hold guns; a simple school slate and stylus, the laptops of its day; a paan crusher, the jingling bangles worn by Kandyan dancers; weapons and daggers that go back to the last kings. And, perhaps most poignant of all, some of the very first examples of the modern world that have so eroded this one: an ancient typewriter; a bakerite phone; a vintage cine film camera; a massive iron fuelled by hot coals.

HAPPY RICE. HAPPY LIFE

Rice, in one form or another, exists at the centre of most things in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankans consume an average of 11 kilos of curries, kothu roti, lamprais, hoppers, kiribath, and sweet puddings each month. And although healthier red rice varieties command more favour here than in most other countries, the country once supported over 2000 different strains, including heirloom varieties like Suwandel, Maa-Wee, and the dark Kalu Heenati (considered something of an aphrodisiac), which are now making a modest comeback.

The crop is planted in two seasons per year: the Maha (bigger) season from September to March, fed by the NE monsoon; and the Yala (smaller) season from May to August. Its cultivation, though improved by mechanisation and disease-resistant varieties, remains elaborate.

The overall paddy track, or Kumburuyaya, is subdivided into smaller plots – liyadi - around which ridges (niyara) are made, pierced by vakkadas to let water in. Often, small areas are left wild to feed the birds that might otherwise eat the paddy. Harrowing or preparing the land, once done by ploughs and oxen, is now mechanised. The land is levelled and seeds, often pregerminated, sown across the watery track – the water itself is typically kept at around 5 cm above the soil. Then the wedding begins. And never stops: patience was ever a virtue best exhibited by rice farmers.

Harvesting is usually a manual process, followed rapidly by drying, storage, and milling; rapid drying is the most critical step. Many people juggle regular jobs with maintaining small pieces of family paddy, tucking their farming work into off-time and weekends, and enlisting family members to help out. And this is just what Maju, our supervisor and butler, does with his piece of family paddy near the estate. The paddy is fed by one of the district’s main streams – the Kospotu Oya, which flows even during the driest of dry seasons.

Together with his wife, Shyamalee, our head housekeeper, and his sons, the paddy is carefully managed. It lies just below the compound where his mother and other family members live – his sister, brother, uncle, aunt, and nephews - and the immediate garden around their houses, shaded by mango trees. Surrounded by his neighbours' plots and encircled by forest and hamlets, it is a perfect picture of authentic country life. And a good place to come to see the crop up close and contemplate its singular importance on the island.

HANDMADE

The modern world has not been especially kind to the craft folk of the island. You have to go deep into the countryside to find genuine examples of craftwork. But every so often, as you travel the island, you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There’s one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. In Pilimathalawa, just eleven miles from The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel, is one dedicated to brass and copper.

Two other examples exist just a few kilometres from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. The first, a woodcarving workshop, is run by Mahinda Jayalath, who has been carving for 30 years. Born into a family some distance from the village, he moved here with his wife's enthusiastic encouragement, who is a local. His workshop is arrestingly modest – a mere covered shelter off a tiny back road where he and his three workers sit making their carvings. His work sits within a most ancient and celebrated Kandyan tradition, for it was here, in the Kandyan kingdom, that the island produced one of its most significant and most forgotten artists - Delmada Devendra Mulachari. Many people will have heard of Grinling Gibbons, the Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II, with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal. But at almost the same time, his equal by any measure was busy doing much the same in Sri Lanka.

Mulachari is renowned for many things, but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale, a 16-mile drive from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A medieval masterpiece, the temple has withstood wars, weather, and, most especially, the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom, in nearby Kandy. By the 1750s, it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari, who lived nearby, his family, one of several Singhala artists from the South, having come north to seek work. Wood carver, sculptor, architect, artist, Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy, especially for King Kirthi Sri Rajasinha, whose 35-year reign, to 1782, was preoccupied with restoring the hundreds of Buddhist temples destroyed in the colonial wars. In this, the king was greatly helped by Mulachari, who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake.

Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. But although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry. The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By compassion, at Embekke Devale, you enter a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest part. In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a masterpiece in itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breastfeeding children, double-headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers, and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world-class carvings. But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a woman; a bird assumes human attributes; a sleight of hand reveals that an elephant is a bull; another, that a lion.

Today, the demand for wood carvings is for doors and windows, fretwork above doors, statues of Lord Buddha, and the odd elephant or cobra for the tourist market. All this, and more, is what Mahinda Jayalath and his tiny team put out. Should you be around for more than two or 3 days, he is more than likely to have enough time to make any special commission.

A few kilometres on from his is another small example of fine craftsmanship – this one dedicated to handloom fabrics. This unexpected outpost of the Department of Textiles has at its heart some six ancient wooden hand looms on which women weave all manner of classic patterns in cotton. A shop next to it sells some of its wares: sarongs and lungis, saris, table mats, and bed linen.

ABANDONED MANSIONS

Sri Lanka is littered with ancient mansions and walawwas, some like palaces, others modest as country mice. They were once the homes, ancient or merely old, of the ruling class, a class not always popular in a democratic socialist republic. They pop up in city centres, down dusty town roads, in jungles, on plantations, amidst paddy, on mountain tops, and off country roads.

Many – if not most –are in a state of severe neglect; a few have been declared national monuments and attract basic survival care; fewer still - such as The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel - have been reimagined as shops, hotels, museums, their future blessed by round-the-clock maintenance.

One such haunting building – The Paranagama Walawwa - lies within a tuk-tuk ride of the hotel, now abandoned and dating back to 1820, a remarkably early date given that the British only signed the Kandyan Convention in 1815, bringing to an end the last independent kingdom in the country and the one that ruled over Galagedera at the time.

Just two years before this mansion was built, the Great Rebellion of 1817–1818 broke out, initiated by frustrated Kandyan chiefs disillusioned with the British colonial administration. The rebellion, now known as the Great Liberation War, was led by the celebrated freedom fighter Keppetipola Disawe, but other leaders did not support him. The British Governor Brownrigg came up from Colombo and established his field headquarters at Kandy to direct military operations against the rebels, backed by extra troops rushed in from British India. His more trained manpower eventually won the day, and the rebellion was crushed.

Keppetipola was taken to Kandy, where he was tried for high treason and sentenced to death by beheading. Bizarrely, his skull was brought to Britain and placed in the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh. When Ceylon gained independence from the British in 1948, Keppetipola was declared a national hero. In 1954, he was returned home and entombed in the Keppetipola Memorial in Kandy, next to the Temple of the Tooth. Brownrigg himself is alleged to have later stolen the priceless, gilded bronze ancient Statue of Tara, now at the centre of a dispute with the British Museum, where it currently resides.

In the two years following the end of the Rebellion and the erecting of this Galagedera mansion, the surrounding countryside, even more remote then than it is today, would have been reeling from the devastating effects of Britain’s scorched earth policy in the area – the killing of cattle and livestock, the destruction of private property and stocks of salt; the burning of rice paddy and confiscation of properties. Herbert White, a British agent, wrote of the situation a few years after 1818: “If thousands died in the battle, they were all fearless and clever fighters. If one considers the remaining population of 4/5 after the battle to be children, women, and the aged, the havoc caused is unlimited. In short, the people have lost their lives and all other valuable belongings. It is doubtful whether Uva has at least now recovered from the catastrophe.”

Little is known about the mansion, which is thought to have been built by J R Paranagama, the Dissawa (Governor of Uva) within the old Kandyan aristocratic hierarchy, and a Mudaliyar at the Kandy Kachcheri – the district secretariat. Many of the succeeding family members became notable lawyers in the country and around Kandy. Today, the mansion lies under the lightest of care from the Archaeological Department, which has nevertheless put on a new roof and rectified some of the most significant erosion that would otherwise have led to the collapse of the entire building.
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That was a production from The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.

The complete list of podcast series from The Ceylon Press includes:

1. The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka
2. Island Stories: The Sri Lanka Podcast
3. Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka
4. Poetry From The Jungle
5. The Jungle Diaries
6. The Archaeologies Diaries