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The Federal Reserve Bank's estimated consumer price index shows that $1 in 1875 was equivalent to $19.56 in 2008.
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load photo-map above: Colombo - Kandy see also: India News - Myanmar News - Thailand News - Maldives News
Sri Lanka NewsDemocratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka: The Sinhalese arrived in Sri Lanka late in the 6th century B.C., probably from northern India. Buddhism was introduced beginning in about the mid-third century B.C., and a great civilization developed at the cities of Anuradhapura (kingdom from circa 200 B.C. to circa 1000 A.D.) and Polonnaruwa (from about 1070 to 1200). In the 14th century, a south Indian dynasty seized power in the north and established a Tamil kingdom. Occupied by the Portuguese in the 16th century and by the Dutch in the 17th century, the island was ceded to the British in 1796, became a crown colony in 1802, and was united under British rule by 1815. As Ceylon, it became independent in 1948; its name was changed to Sri Lanka in 1972. Tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatists erupted in violence in the mid-1980s. Tens of thousands have died in an ethnic war that continues to fester. After two decades of fighting, the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) formalized a cease-fire in February 2002 with Norway brokering peace negotiations. Violence between the LTTE and government forces intensified in 2006 and the government regained control of the Eastern Province in 2007. In May 2009, the government announced that its military had finally defeated the remnants of the LTTE and that its leader, Velupillai PRABHAKARAN, had been killed. During the post-conflict years under then-President Mahinda RAJAPAKSA, the government initiated infrastructure development projects, many of which were financed by loans from China. His regime faced significant allegations of human rights violations and a shrinking democratic space for civil society. In 2015, a new coalition government headed by then-President Maithripala SIRISENA of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and then-Prime Minister Ranil WICKREMESINGHE of the United National Party came to power with pledges to advance economic, governance, anti-corruption, reconciliation, justice, and accountability reforms. However, implementation of these reforms was uneven. In November 2019, Gotabaya RAJAPAKSA won the presidential election and appointed his brother, Mahinda, prime minister. Following Gotabaya RAJAPAKSA’s election, civil society raised concerns about his administration’s commitment to pursuing justice, human rights, and accountability reforms, as well as the risks to foreign creditors that Sri Lanka faces given its ongoing economic crisis. A combination of factors including the impact of the worldwide COVID pandemic; severe shortages of food, medicine, and fuel; and power outages triggered increasingly violent protests in Columbo beginning in March 2022. In May 2022, longtime parliamentarian and former five-time prime minister, Ranil WICKREMESINGHE replaced Mahinda RAJAPASKA as prime-minister and then in July 2022, Gotabaya RAJAPAKSA fled from office in response to protests, and parliament subsequently elected WICKREMESINGHE president. Later that month, WICKREMESINGHE appointed Dinesh GUNAWARDENA to replace him as prime minister. CIA World Factbook: Sri Lanka Area of Sri Lanka: 65,610 sq km slightly larger than West Virginia Population of Sri Lanka: 21,513,990 July 2010 estimate Languages of Sri Lanka: Sinhala 74% official and national language Tamil 18% national language - other 8% English is commonly used in government and is spoken competently by about 10% of the population Sri Lanka Capital: Colombo SRI JAYAWARDENEPURA KOTTE WEATHER Free Books on Sri Lanka (.pdfs)Fine Art in India & Ceylon Smith 1911Ceylon: A Handbook Willis 1907 Golden Tips: Ceylon... Tea Industry Cave 1905 Fifty Years in Ceylon Skinner 1891 Forest Life in Ceylon v1 Knighton 1854 The Interior of Ceylon Davy 1821 The Island of Ceylon Percival 1803 Online Book Search Engines Sri Lanka Reference Articles and LinksWikipedia: Sri Lanka - History of Sri LankaBBC Country Profile: Sri Lanka US State Department: Sri Lanka Profile History of Ceylon Tea Sri Lanka Ministry of Defence WikiTravel: Sri Lanka Sri Lanka News WebsitesSri Lanka Daily NewsSri Lanka Sunday Observer Lanka Page Lanka Academic InfoLanka News Room Official Gov't News Portal LankaWeb News |
The New York Times, April 22, 1888, p.10:UP TO KANDY FROM THE SEAWHERE THE AIR IS BRACING AND THE SCENERY FINE.MEMORIES OF SAVAGE WARFARE—A LAKE AMONG THE MOUNTAINS—TRAVEL IN CEYLON BY RAIL. KANDY, Ceylon, Feb. 6—In our flight up here from the coast we have, indeed, lost the sea, but we have found the hills instead, and so far the exchange is unquestionably in our favor. Any one who has seen for himself what surpassing grandeur looks forth through all the blackness and bareness of stormy Montenegro, with its drifting snows and black frowning precipices, can faintly imagine hundredfold glories of a tropical Montenegro within 8° of the line, with all the splendor of equatorial vegetation outpoured over every ridge and hollow in a rank and riotous abundance compared with which the brightest coloring of European gardens is as nothing. As yet we are hardly 2,000 feet above the sea, but in a few days time we expect to move up 4,000 more, and to enjoy in all its fullness the finest climate in the world, viz., the atmosphere of tropical mountains during the cool season. In the meantime our present surroundings are picturesque enough to be worth a much longer stay than we shall have time to make among them. Kandy is indeed a perfect realization of that strange country up in the air about which we used to read in Jack and the Beanstalk. In a kind of cup hidden away among the wooded hilltops glitters a tiny lake—just as if some mountain giant had poured out a glass of water for himself and then forgotten all about it—and on the margin of this lake the dainty white houses of a pretty little toy town nestle amid a green mass of clustering leaves, while all around it the great ridges of the Kandyan mountains, crested with palms and mangoes to the very summit, roll up wave beyond wave against the warm dreamy blue of the tropical sky. So still and bright and peaceful is the whole scene, in the freshness of early morning, that we may well find it hard to believe that these quiet little brown-faced fellows who glide noiselessly past us really belong to one of the most savage races upon earth, or that this charming valley has witnessed deeds of hell surpassing the worst horrors of Turkey's vengeance upon Bulgaria. Yet such is actually the case. There are very probably a few old men still alive in the labyrinth of leaf-thatched hovels behind our hotel who can remember the evil days when scores of victims were slung into this beautiful lake with their hands tied, and when these slient palm groves echoed with the shrieks of children tortured and butchered before the very eyes of their mothers, who perished in their turn by the same torments before the blood of their murdered infants was dry. But these grim memories, and countless others more grim and ghastly still, have left little outward trace upon the quiet beauty of the lovliest valley in Western Ceylon. Man's ravage is as transient as himself, and the forgiveness of eternal nature covers his intrenchments with wild flowers and his battlefields with fresh grass, almost before the thunders of war have ceased to rend the air. Poppies bloom rich and red above the countless slain of Inkerman. Sheep feed peacefully among the grave mounds of Balaklava. Stately palms cast their protecting shadow upon the calm, sweet face of the marble angel that watches over the thrice-accursed well of Cawnpore [Kanpur]. So it is with Kandy likewise. An English library now stands on the spot where two innocent women were hurled into the lake with heavy chains attached to their feet, while the human hyena who called himself King of Kandy laughed with hellish glee at the vail agonies of their death struggle. Ladies sit over their books or their work in easy chairs along the veranda of a comfortable hotel where once 170 British wounded were burned alive as an acceptable sacrifice to the idols of Kandy. A mail train now rattles every day through the steep rocky gorge from which, in days that not a few living men can remember, the mountain robbers were wont to pour downward from this historical vulture's nest, bent on one of their exterminating raids over the wide, rich plain below. As the traveler glides away toward Matale along a recently-opened railroad, a large tree close to the track is pointed out to him as marking the scene of the hideous massacre of Wattepolowa, (described in one of my letters from England last fall,) when there were slaughtered like sheep more than 500 English prisoners who had rashly trusted themselves to the good faith of a gang of cut-throats to whom faith and mercy were alike unknown. But it would seem that the Kandyans of the present generation have not wholly forgotten the tricks of their fathers, if I may judge by the following announcement, which greeted my astonished eyes in the vestibule of the hotel on our arrival here last Monday, and later on in every part of the building:
This is almost equal to the famous "Notice" said to have been posted up in a hotel opposite the gambling saloon at Baden-Baden:
But even the chance of being rifled by these amateur Custom House officers is well worth risking for the sake of that glorious and life-giving freshness that replaces among these breezy mountain peaks the hot, rank, lifeless closeness of the great jungle swamp below. Worse by far than the heat is the all-pervading damp, which makes your very clothes cling to you till you feel like a pound of butter rolled up in a newspaper. Even on the very beach itself, where the fresh sea breeze does its best to relieve the prevailing deadness and lassitude, the atmospheric oppression is bad enough, but further inland it becomes absolutely overwhelming. You see its baneful effect in everything around you... But you seem to have got into a new world when once you have climbed the great mountain wall of Kandy and passed through the lifeguard of wooded hills encircling the famous natural fortress which defied all invaders for more than three centuries, after every other part of Ceylon had fallen under the power of European conquerors. Even during the heat of the day there is nearly always a fresh breeze along the higher slopes; but in the morning and evening the atmosphere is cool and bracing enough to make you imagine yourself on the uplands of Norway or the mountains of Switzerland rather than in the heart of one of the hottest regions of tropical Asia. If you want to enjoy yourself thoroughly in Kandy, get up at 5:30, have a cold bath and a cup of tea, and start out for a mountain walk before the sun is high. Away, away, up curve after curve of the steep winding road, now grazing the edge of a fathomless precipice and now plunging into the rich purple gloom of a shady palm grove, while around and above you all the wonders of tropical vegetation outspread themselves in the fullness of their unutterable splendor! Mile after mile the grand mountain scenery unrolls before you in the cloudless glory of the sunrise its magnificent panorama of ridge and valley, rock and stream, shadowy woods and glittering waterfalls, and as you mount higher and higher, the keen, bracing mountain air seems to rush through your veins in a stream of living fire, sending an elastic vigor pulsing through every nerve and muscle which makes the mere sense of existence an enjoyment. But all this while I am forgetting to describe the most picturesque experience that we have yet had in Ceylon, viz., our railway journey up here from the coast last Monday morning. Early as it is when we rattle up to the central station in a light gharri (native hack carriage) it is already quite hot enough, and threatening to become ere long what I once heard an English tourist call "more hotterer." We are glad to find ourselves snugly seated in an airy "saloon car," with its well-cushioned sofas round three sides of it and a mirror and lavatory on the fourth, from the open windows of which, overshadowed by sloping screens projecting several feet beyond the roof, we look down upon a very strange and motley scene, which would considerably astonish one whose ideas of a railway station had been formed in Europe or America. Dark-skinned hackmen in crimson turbans, brown-faced conductors with red Turkish caps and sashes, bare-limbed peddlers selling betel nuts [areca nuts] and chupatties [Chapatis] (thin wheat cakes) instead of newspapers and novels, ticket clerks arrayed in striped skirts and white cotton caps, and railway notices posted up in letters which look like the fragments of countless pairs of broken scissors. And now comes a kind of curious procession, in which are curiously represented the four different religions of Ceylon. Two Roman Catholic nuns come gliding noiselessly past in their long black shrouds, with the rigid white band imprisoning faces in which—pale and thin though they are—fasts and vigils have not totally extinguished the traces of beauty which must once have been far beyond that of ordinary women. Following them appears a Buddhist priest, with his whole head shaven as smooth as a billiard ball, and his gaunt body completely enveloped in a loose yellow robe, all except the right arm, which is left bare to the very shoulder. Next on the list comes a turbaned Mohammedan trader eyeing the "unbelieving dog" with a look of undisguised aversion. Then this singular procession is closed by a stout Protestant clergyman with a big umbrella, looking very hot and uncomfortable in his black broadcloth coat and evidently not in the best of tempers at finding that the train is likely to be crowded. Crowded indeed it is, as we soon discover to our cost. A Peninsular and Oriental steamer has just arrived, bringing with her from Melbourne a throng of enthusiastic Australian holiday makers, who have all come ashore in a body, bent upon doing a match against time to Kandy and back "to see all they can," which, considering that they have only two days for the whole expedition, is likely to be little enough. Five of them come bursting into our car one after another, filling up all the vacant places, and they have barely time to seat themselves when the whistle sounds and we are off. But we are off only to halt again a few minutes later at Maradana Junction, where the coast line to Mount Lavinia and Kalutara (described in my first letter from Ceylon) forks off from the Kandy Railway. Here we have a fearful proof of what this baneful climate can do in a spectacle of a poor wretch hobblilng painfully across the station platform, dragging after him a foot almost as thick as a gate post, the result of that horrible "elephantiœsis," which is one of the worst scourges of Southern Asia. In truth, such warnings as these, and others even more grim, meet one at every turn in the heart of this bright region, showing that beneath all its gorgeous coloring and rich tropical beauty, death lies awaiting hungrily for his prey. On either side of us, far as the eye can reach, extends the rank, unwholesome green of the low, wet rice fields, mapped out into chess-board squares by the narrow, slippery footpaths that run between them. Then the scene changes and we plunge amid dense masses of dark, matted thicket, forming an impenetrable wall against the fresh breeze that strives in vain to fling a breath of health and life into the hot, stifling closeness that broods over them forever. And now the thickets in their turn are replaced by the foul, sluggish waters of a boundless swamp, out of which starts up, spectrally, every here and there the huge, broad back of a wallowing buffalo or black head of a native fowler. Grim work it must have been for the earliest European invaders of Ceylon, weighed down as they were by their clumsy guns and heavy accoutrements, to drag themselves through these deadly morasses, gnawed by hunger and giddy from want of sleep, while man after man sank down and died beneath the blighting breath of the fever... But little by little the distant hills begin to stand out plainer and plainer, the ground becomes rugged and broken, and wooded ridges rise around us, through the clustering leaves of which vast boulders of purple rock start out ever and anon. We are leaving the cities of the plain behind us at last, and by the time we reach the foot of the Rambukauna incline (where the ascent to Kandy begins in earnest, with an extra locomotive to help,) we can indulge in a comfortable sense of having got over the worst part of the journey. Just at this point breakfast is announced, and we scurry along the platform to the "refreshment car" in front of the train. But, although the tea is "pure Cingalese" and the curried chicken almost faultless, we make but a poor meal, for the surpassing grandeur of the encircling scenery keeps us jumping up every half minute or so to look at some fresh wonder, in a way not at all conductive to wholesome digestion. Upward, ever upward—now gliding through a cutting so narrow that we instinctively hold our breath in momentary expectation of a crash against the dark-red rocks on either side—now plunging head-long into the black depths of a tunnel, only to burst forth again the next moment into the glory of tropical sunshine and the many-colored blaze of tropical flowers; now brushing aside in our passage a mass of overarching palm leaves, and now hanging in midair upon the brink of a fathomless precipice. And still, as we mount higher and higher, the wonderful panorama below us outspreads itself in ever-widening range—shaggy woods and trim plantations, sparkling streams and sunny valleys, frowning rocks crested with feathery palm trees, and bare patches red clay gaping like raw wounds in the green hillside—till it seems as if we could see all over the world at once. "Do you see that white streak over yonder among the bushes?" says our opposite neighbor, an English telegraph official. "That's the old highroad from Colombo, by which we used to go up and down before the railway was completed. Now, keep a look out, for we're just coming to a place called Sensation Rock, which ought to startle you if anything can." Scarcely has he spoken when we are rushing past the famous spot itself, and our fellow-passengers lean out of the windows with muttered exclamations of amazement, as well they may. Seldom, indeed, in any part of the earth have I seen a more perfect realization of my childish imaginings about "the edge of the world." The whole mountain side appears to have been cut sheer away with one slash of a mighty sword, and as we bend over the side of the car we look down nearly a thousand feet into a wide, green valley, where the native houses seem as small as pebbles, and the towering palms that overshadow them look no bigger than ears of corn. Just one moment do we hang poised on the brink of that awful gulf, and then it is gone as if it had never been, and we are steaming onward to Kadugannawa, the highest point of the railway, 2,000 feet above the sea. Thence we rattle downward again into the wooded hollow in which lies cradled the capital of the Cingalese Montenegro, and at 11:15 A. M. (having taken 3 hours 45 minutes to accomplish the 72 miles from the seaboard,) we find ourselves fairly in Kandy at last. DAVID KER.
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