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The show that explores what makes Sri Lanka Sri Lankan.
The 7 Wonders of Ancient Lanka | Part 3
Sri Lanka’s seven greatest wonders from ancient times include a palace to escape death, a dish, a book, and a fortress. But what made them so fundamental – to the nation and the world – as to earn their place in history?
Reservoir, tree, stupas. All came before this, ancient Sri Lanka’s fourth great wonder - a palace built to escape death and suffering. Built by the self-same great king, Dutugamunu, who commissioned the Ruwanweliseya, the oldest of Aurnadupura’s three great stupas, the Brazen Palace, or Lowamahapaya, was built between 161 BC and 137 BC. Its name, “brazen”, comes from the brass or copper roof tiles that covered it.
For centuries, this was the island’s most magnificent building. The king had his architects draw up no-limit plans for an opulent palace-monastery, two hundred feet long, rising nine stories, each story punctured by a hundred windows. Observers spoke of the entire edifice containing a thousand rooms – an obvious exaggeration, but one that was not really required. For the building was, by any standards, a masterpiece.
Inside the vast structure, golden pillars held up the roof of a special throne hall, its centrepiece an ivory throne centred between the titanic images of a golden sun, a moon and stars picked out in silver and pearls. The gilded roof glinted so fiercely in the sunlight that it could be seen from miles away. No expense was spared in its furnishings either. Even the basins for washing hands and feet at its entrance were said to be of gold.
Each floor of the building was given over to monks in varying stages of sanctification as they travelled the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. Naturally, the lowest floor, the Buddhist equivalent of Perfumes & Make Up in a Department Store, was reserved for those who had yet to achieve anything. If not quite the habitat of the hoi polloi, it was not that far off either.
The second floor, however, was allocated for those who had mastered the Tripitaka – three texts in the Buddhist Pali Canon, primarily concerned with doctrinal requirements and monastic rules.
It was only on reaching the third floor of this extraordinary structure that you could encounter monks who had made a real step change, for these had attained Sotapatti, the first stage of sanctification – an achievement made possible by having trounced indecision, obsession with individuality, and rituals.
The fourth floor was populated by monks who had contributed to this achievement by making serious inroads into eradicating all tendencies towards ill-will. And, more importantly, any thoughts of sensuality.
On the fifth floor lived the Anagamin monks – those who were now seeking to overcome pride, restlessness, ignorance, fine things, and immaterial cravings to become an arhat. And above them all, in the upper stories of this temple of gold, lived the Arahats themselves. This lofty station, the goal of all practising Buddhists, was reserved for those who have finally achieved Nirvana. Not for them the irksome and interminable cycle of rebirth.
Despite the building burning down, it was faithfully rebuilt in all its brilliance by King Saddha Tissa, Dutugemunu’s brother. Further repairs were carried out 120 years later, and a pavilion decorated with gemstones was added. But by the time of King Siri Naga I, sometime after 195 CE, the repairs carried out on this and other buildings in Anuradhapura were noticeably more modest in their goals.
Buildings such as this one were made good but reduced in size and scope, perhaps for easier maintenance, or maybe because there was simply insufficient money to keep them as they had been first envisioned. It was, in its own grey and mildly dispiriting way, a metaphor for its time.
Today, you need a rich imagination and a keen sense of history to imagine how the Brazen Palace would have looked – even in Siri Naga I’s time. Destroyed eight hundred years later, in the tenth century, by Tamil invaders, it is today reduced to one thousand six hundred granite columns set in forty rows – all that survives of its once-colossal walls.
As Shelley might have said had he added Sri Lanka to his well-documented French, Swiss, German, Dutch, and Irish holidays: “nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,” stretch yet more ruins, scrub, and jungle.
Sri Lanka’s fifth great wonder is a mystery. Perishable, yet still found in almost every island household at some point in any week, its origins may be obscure. Still, historians appear to agree on one thing: it is uniquely Sri Lankan, originating here at some very distant point in the remote past before being adopted in many other parts of South Asia, and even further afield.
Uniquely, it is also a wonder that almost anyone who knows how to boil rice can construct. The recipe is simple. Once cooked, add coconut milk to the rice and cook for five more minutes, until no liquid remains. Then slice it into shapes – diamonds are a favourite - and leave it to cool and dry a little more.
Kiribath, the dish's name, is the ultimate comfort food. And yet, like Dior’s little black dress, it is immensely versatile too. It can be served with anything: poached eggs, foie gras, curry, marmalade - but by far the best consumable accessory is Seeni Sambol, a sweet, tangy, caramelised onion flavoured with all the spices for which the island is so famous - tamarind, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, curry and pandan leaves, chilli and turmeric.
Most, if not all, the food made on the island can be found elsewhere: in India, of course, but also the Maldives, Malaysia, the Arab world, Portugal, Holland, and Britain. These shared dishes have, over the centuries, evolved into distinctly Sri Lankan dishes, but only kiribath seems to have begun its world journey from this island.
It is also the only food item to have inspired a stupa – the Kiribath Vehera in Anuradhapura, a small, barely standing, and much-overlooked stupa of almost unimaginable antiquity that was once said to house the sacred tooth relic itself, whose own origins, like the dish itself, are equally opaque.
Yet Kiribath’s very existence signifies several fundamental things about Sri Lanka that reach far further than mere corporeal cravings.
Like so many other Asian countries, rice is the country’s staple food, more so even than bread in the West. Sri Lanka devours over 2.4 million metric tons of it annually.
A semi-aquatic plant, rice needs water to grow, around 2,500 litres of it for every kilo of harvested rice. Had ancient Sri Lanka rested on the calibre of those distant aquatic laurels that gave rise to Panda Wewa in the 4th century BCE, the country would have evolved little further than a few modest kingdoms. To grow the vast amounts of rice that were needed, then and now, considerable advances in water technology were required.
And these are best epitomised by bisokotuwas – cutting-edge sluices, their design and position modified and perfected by the kingdom’s hydrogeological engineers, the Quantum Computing scientists of their day.
Their revolutionary innovations were far ahead of anything else in the world. They ensured that water could be released from a reservoir without putting so much pressure on the dam embankment that it would collapse. But at scale – for this was the breakthrough.
The new sluice designs greenlit the possible size of reservoirs, allowing them to scale up to unprecedented levels; water in unimaginably large 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.
One of the very oldest bisokotuwas can still be seen at Kudawilachchiya, an ancient, abandoned tank located inside Wilpattu National Park. It was constructed here sometime after 67 BCE by the first Lambakanna king, Vasabha. The stone slabs used on its inner face fit so perfectly together that there is no room for even the modest weed to grow. Rising above it, the sluice tower itself can still be seen.
At the time, it would also have sported many other refinements that maximised water availability - inceptor zones, for example, created between the tank and the paddy fields by planting 77 types of trees and plants whose well-developed root systems would absorb the salts and heavy metals from the water before it reached the paddy.
Tree belts were planted well above the water tank to stop wind, waves, and evaporation. Sedges, grasses, and special shrubs were planted to purify water run-off. Extensive catchment forests were planted to raise the groundwater table and regularise water supply to the tanks during the dry season. And in the nearby upper catchment areas, small dams and miniature tanks were constructed to deliberately make the land marshy and capture silt that would otherwise run into the tanks.
Vasabha is also credited with building extensive canals to transport water over very long distances, using gravity to propel it along its course by creating a gradient of 10 centimetres per kilometre. “It is possible,” wrote a Mr Bailey, Assistant Government Agent of the District of Badulla in 1885, “that in no other part of the world are there to be found within the same space, the remains of so many works of irrigation, which are at the same time of such great antiquity and of such vast magnitude as in Ceylon. Probably no other country can exhibit works so numerous and at the same time so ancient and extensive, within the same limited area, as in this Island.”
These innovations propelled the modest Anuradhapuran Kingdom into the political stratosphere, creating such rice surpluses as to underpin an economy that would maintain a flourishing and confident international presence in South Asia and within the Indian Ocean trading zone. But of the many benefits water technology and the exponential expansion of paddy land created, none is so great a wonder as that most refined and delicious of rice dishes: kiribath, the country’s fourth and only consumable wonder.
The fifth wonder of ancient Sri Lanka is a book, one that is still in use today, almost unchanged since the time in which it was first written - The Pali Canon. Eighty times the size of the Bible, this textbook on Buddhism reveals much more than the religion itself. It symbolises the island’s enduring attachment to rules, regulations, and laws.
The country’s legal system is a mixture of Roman-Dutch law, English law, Kandian law, Thesavalamai and Muslim law. Overwriting all this is its constitution. But even this is most commonly accepted as correct, and that is primarily dictated by Buddhism's mores, its paramount religion.
Even the most unwritten of a country’s laws have a source somewhere that was at some time described in custom, on stone inscriptions, on paper or in art - and so it is here. The source for so much that goes as said on the island can be traced back to the Pali Canon – not simply to its many instructions and recommendations but as much to the spirit of the Canon that, like the air we breathe, influences most parts of Sri Lankan society, even those that are not even Buddhist.
And for this, the country can give thanks to the remarkable Valagamba, known by some as the boomerang king for his fantastic ability to bounce back from even the most disastrous encounters, and the very same monarch responsible for building the massive Abhayagiri Stupa.
Valagamba’s older three brothers had been kings before him. Still, the last of the trio, Khallata Naga, managed to get himself murdered by his army chief, Kammaharattaka, who did his best to marginalise and even kill Valagamba. He failed. Valagamba won the ensuing fight, killed the murderous army chief and took over the throne by 103 BCE.
But within months, the new king was faced and defeated by the armies of 5 Pandyan Tamil chiefs who had invaded the island from India. Deposed a second time, the king evaded capture, and his many escapes and hiding places illuminated the map of Sri Lanka like a Catch-Me-If-You-Can treasure hunt.
His most famous hideaway was probably the Gunadaha Rajamaha Viharaya in Galagedera, where the flat plains of the Anuradhapura Kingdom rise into the mountains that enfold the centre of the island, and with them, protection and cover. From that time until the final routing of the invaders in 89 BCE, Valagamba led a guerrilla war that, month by month, won ascendancy.
Eventually, grappling his way back to power in 89 BCE, Valagamba retook his crown through a series of minor, successful incremental skirmishes - although, given the murderous incompetence of his Dravidian interlopers, it may have been like pushing on an open door.
His second reign was to last for over a dozen years, years in which, having taken stock of the risks to Buddhism by Tamil invasions, the ephemerality of Lord Buddha’s teachings that were at time merely oral, and the increasing schisms within Buddhist orders as different monks set about interpreting Lord Buddha’s teaching with every greater diversity, he decided it was time to write it all down, copy it and distribute it right across his kingdom.
Under his patronage, in the Aluvihare Rock Temple 30 miles north of Kandy, 500 monks assembled to begin the task. It was to be a momentous moment for the challenge they had set themselves; it was immense. Firstly, they had to recite doctrines that were, at best, only remembered orally. That would have taken many years. Then they had to agree on an acceptable version of the teachings before transcription. That must have taken even longer. Finally came the lengthy work of transcribing them, using ola leaves from talipot palms.
The resulting Pali Canon became the standard scripture of Theravada Buddhism. It was written in the now-extinct Pali language, an ancient Indian language thought to have been spoken by the Buddha and used in Sri Lanka until the fifth century CE.
Scholars argue (as they do) about how much of the work can be attributed to one person or to Buddha himself – but believers are mainly free of such elaborate debates. The Canon lays out, in unambiguous terms, the doctrines and rules of conduct that Buddhists should follow. It consists of three parts.
The first, the Vinaya, concerns itself mainly with the rules for monks and nuns. The second, the Sutta Pitaka, is the Canon’s practical heart, comprising around 10,000 teachings and poems by the Buddha and his close companions that focus on the everyday challenges of life. The last, the Abhidhamma Pitaka, is where the higher teachings sit – the ones most focused on Enlightenment.
The monks were probably still hard at work on the Pali Canon when Valagamba died in 77 BCE, bringing his adopted son, Mahakuli Mahatissa, to power. But under his patronage, copies were dispatched across the kingdom and to other Buddhist countries. Aluvihare Rock Temple still exists, its caves dotted with ancient inscriptions, but its great library was burned down during the Matale Rebellion in 1848.
No other religion, still less any other Buddhist chapter in any other Buddhist country, has a single document as immense and comprehensive as the Pali Canon to govern its actions.
This review of ancient Sri Lanka’s seven great wonders ends where it began – at Sigiriya. And it is hard to really know where to start, so great is the site - 3 km in length and nearly 1 km in width, flanking its famous rock citadel.
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 hermit monks between the third century BCE and the first century CE, it was exposed by colossal landslides and then selected by King Kashyapa I as the location of a new fortress capital in 477 CE.
Much of it is hard to identify today. Still, in its day, it set new standards for urban planning: a royal bastion surrounded by an elaborately laid-out outer city, with a final circle of three types of gardens: water, terraced, and boulder gardens.
Ponds, pavilions, fountains and cut pools made up the water gardens. More naturalistic gardens were created around massive boulders, creating 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 out double moats and triple ramparts, defendable gateways, and steps in perfect geometric symmetry, locking all the elements of the fortress city together with mathematical precision and elegance and pierced by the massive sentinel sculpture of a crouching lion.
The beast guards the staircase to the ancient palace six hundred feet above, though all that remains now are the two animal paws, rediscovered in excavations in 1898. Built with bricks and limestone, the lion’s full height was 45 feet. The rest of the creature lies in dust around the site, but even so, it gave its name to the place: “Sigiriya,” the Singhalese for “Lion’s Rock.” Gazing at it, the most irresistible connection is, of course, to the legendary Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II, recalled by Shelley in his poem Ozymandias.
When King Kashyapa died, having wisely chosen to drive a sword through his own body rather than be captured alive, the city sank into a desolate retreat for a handful of monks getting so overgrown by jungle through the passing centuries that its rediscovery in 1831 by Major Jonathan Forbes of the 78th (Highlanders) Regiment of Foot was the sensation of the year. Forbes was no ordinary officer.
His book, Eleven Years in Ceylon, published in 1840, is regarded as a masterpiece. He himself was so obsessed with rumours of Sigiriya that he dedicated himself to detection, writing later: “From the spot where we halted, I could distinguish massive stone walls appearing through the trees near the base of the rock, and now felt convinced that this was the very place I was anxious to discover.”
A remarkable hydraulic irrigation system fueled the whole site. Rock-cut horizontal and vertical drains, underground terracotta pipes, tanks, ponds, interconnected conduits, cisterns, moats, and waterways channelled surface water to stop erosion. They tapped other water sources to deliver water to the huge ornamental gardens, the city and palace - and harness it to help cool the microclimate of the royal residences.
And this is perhaps the place to pause and select the one thing that sets the site apart as a wonder of the ancient Sri Lankan world. One wall – the ‘Mirror Wall’ was so highly polished as to reflect what faced it. “Wet with cool dew drops,” wrote one bedazzled tourist of the ancient world on the mirror wall itself, “fragrant with perfume from the flowers, came the gentle breeze, jasmine and water lily, dance in the spring sunshine.” But another was turned into a vast art gallery, plastered, and painted white, and, it is said, covered with over five hundred frescos.
Twenty-one frescos remain, made from paints whose vibrant pigments came from plants and minerals: iron oxide reds, chalk and lime whites, ochre yellows, charcoal blacks. The king was said to have a harem of over 500 women, and these images appear to be of them: large paintings made directly onto the rock, hovering appropriately above the heads of any passing people.
Few if any secular paintings from ancient Sri Lanka survive – but these. Their existence, so many hundreds of years on, despite monsoon rain and plunderers, is a wonder all in its own right.
The women's eyes are adorned with makeup, their bodies with jewels, and their clothes diaphanous and almost wantonly luxurious. Lotuses fill their hands, and trays of other flowers and fruits are seen, presented to them. And in one, a consort or concubine, a precursor to Mona Lisa herself, can be seen looking on in silent debate over which particular frangipani flower to select for her hair: a frangipani princess now over 1,500 years old, and quite easily the last and most beautiful wonder of ancient Lanka.
That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at 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.