Part 6

Before we start on our tour let us study the map and form some 8 idea of the shape and nature of the land which we are about to visit. Ceylon hangs like a pearl, as the eastern poets say, from the end of India, to which it is nearly joined by the chain of small islands and reefs which lie between the Gulf of Manaar and Palk Strait. So shallow is the passage that large steamers do not venture through, and proposals have already been made for carrying a railway across. Ceylon is almost as large as Ireland; the whole of the north is flat, and a belt of lowland forty to fifty miles wide runs all round the east and south coasts. In the southwest the belt narrows, between the sea and the foothills of the block of highland which fills up much of the interior. This block is an irregular plateau-like country, crossed by ridges from northwest to southeast, cut into by deep gorges and crowned by sharp peaks, many of which rise over six thousand feet. The rivers are short and swift, except where they traverse the broader lowlands of the north and northeast. The southwest corner, with its highlands and coast strip and its entrance at Colombo, is the real Ceylon of to-day; though in former times the coast and the interior had each a distinct and separate life and history.

The whole island is represented in the crowd, bewildering in its variety of face and dress, which greets us on our landing 9 in Colombo. Here is a typical Sinhalese, wearing the _comboy_, a wide length of cloth, of white or striped cotton, which is wrapped round the lower half of the body; his long hair is done up in a knot behind and ornamented with a tortoiseshell comb, which gives a strange appearance to his head. We see this comb, in its most elaborate form, in the portrait of a high-caste 10 Sinhalese; and we notice that, except for the comb, he wears 11 ordinary European dress. Here again is a native in the street wearing a shawl round his shoulders, and yet another with a neat drill jacket; the latter is probably in the service of Europeans. The building behind them is a native theatre, roofed over with green palm leaves. Finally, we have a picture of a typical 12 Sinhalese girl of the lower class.

Then we come on a group of dark-brown men wearing loincloths and turbans and repairing the roadway with pick and shovel; 13 these are Tamil coolies from Southern India, doing the heavy work of the town. Another trots in the shafts of a ricksha, 14 the carriage of the East, which we shall meet again. As we go further into the town, we meet natives from the country districts on their way to market in two-wheeled carts, thatched with 15 leaves of the coconut palm and drawn by little humped bullocks. They wear the _comboy_ and little else, as they are less influenced by foreign ideas than the people of the town. Let us follow them into the _Pettah_, or native quarter, 16 with its trams and rickshas and busy shops. Here we see the carts collected in the open market place, and in the streets we 17 notice a new type of men; these are Moormen or Mohammedans, who carry on much of the business of the town. Some of them wear the fez, which we see at times even in our own country; others, more old-fashioned, wear strange-looking hats shaped like a beehive. On our way back we pass a Hindu temple, which reminds us 18 again that India, its people and its creeds are close at hand.

The Europeans are almost as varied as the natives. Some are English, officials or planters; others are Dutch by race; while there are also a great number of half-caste descendants of the original Portuguese settlers. Many of the half-castes bear Portuguese names and imitate European dress and manners.

We can easily see something of the habits of the poorer classes since they live largely in the public view. Their houses are wattled huts of mud and bamboo, thatched with leaves or roofed with red tiles, and open to the street except at night when they are boarded up carefully, as the Sinhalese are not fond of the night air. We may perhaps see a family occupied with the morning toilet, in front of the house; and here in a corner of the lake are the _dhobies_ or native washermen at work. The lake is 19 one of the most beautiful sights of the town; it is really one of the lagoons which we find all round the coast, where the mouth of a stream has silted up. The Dutch, following their home customs, utilized these lagoons and developed a system of canals along the low coastline. Part of the system is still in use, and we can travel by small steamer from Colombo northward to Negombo. 20 Here is a scene on the canal. The Dutch have also left traces of their rule in scattered fortifications and in the Roman-Dutch law which is still the basis of the legal administration in the island. Many of the lawyers in the local courts are of Dutch descent.

The Dutch had ample time to leave their mark on Ceylon, as they held it from the middle of the seventeenth century, when they wrested it from the Portuguese, until the end of the eighteenth, when it was handed over to Great Britain at the time when Holland was subject to France. The Dutch traders were attracted to Colombo and the southwest coast by the cinnamon which grew there; the bark of the cinnamon was the most valuable product of Ceylon and almost the only export, apart from elephants, until well into the nineteenth century. The cinnamon trade was a strict government monopoly, enforced by harsh penal laws, and the monopoly remained, even under English rule, until 1832. One other interesting trace of Dutch rule survives in the many miles of palm groves, planted by forced native labour, which we have already noticed along the coast from Colombo to Galle.

For a century and a half before the Dutch occupation the island was under the power of Portugal. The wars of the Dutch were undertaken to advance their trade; but the Portuguese fought for the idea of Empire, and one of their chief aims was the conversion of the conquered races to Christianity. The effect of Portuguese rule still survives in the coast districts where Portuguese names are common, in the mixed race and the local corrupt Portuguese dialect, and above all in the thousands of natives professing the Roman Catholic religion. The word Don, formerly a Portuguese title, is still in use among the natives as a personal name, and many even of the pure Sinhalese have adopted high-sounding Portuguese names.

Neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese succeeded in subduing the highlands of the interior; their occupation and interests were limited to the coast strip. It was left to England, in the nineteenth century, to penetrate inland and build roads and bring the whole of the island under a single control. We now leave Colombo, and travel by train to visit the highlands and the old capital at Kandy, where we shall learn something of the up-country Sinhalese, who differ considerably from those of the sea-coast. The line is built on a broad gauge and the train has a comfortable restaurant car attached as in England. At the start, we run through mile after mile of padi fields. The native agriculture is simple: first the muddy earth is scratched with a primitive plough, drawn by water buffaloes, which are used 21 in the fields as the wet mud does them no harm; the crop is sown with many strange ceremonies, and a little later the water impounded from the streams is allowed to flow over the young plants; later still the land is again drained dry and the ripened grain is reaped by hand. The Sinhalese are agriculturalists and nothing else; working on their own land is among them the most honourable pursuit, though they are not as ready to work for others. They brought with them from their original home in Bengal their national taste for rice, and kept to their former habits, although much of Ceylon is not well fitted for its cultivation, and great irrigation works were necessary to provide the water. Even on the hillsides we still see the padi grown by means of terraces. On the ridges between the padi fields are groves of coconut palms; and here and there we come on a native village 22 or house, like the one in front of us, always with its little group of palms and other trees, growing without attention and providing for most of the simple wants of the villager. The leaves provide thatch for his hut, unless he is wealthy enough to use red tiles, and are woven into mats or baskets; the stalks make fences, while the trunks give beams and troughs and furniture. From the sap he makes sugar and spirits: the husk of the nut gives fibre for rope: the shell makes drinking bowls and spoons; while the kernel can be eaten, or dried as copra and then pressed for the oil, which is exported to Europe. We have already seen this in the Seychelles. It is hardly surprising that where Nature supplies so much without effort on his part, the Sinhalese is not according to our ideas industrious. To him the coconut palm is a necessary part of his existence, and he well expresses this in the saying that the tree will not grow out of sound of the human voice. But the coconut palm has another aspect in Ceylon. The Sinhalese gentry have discovered its commercial value, and in various parts of the island, especially round Negombo and Batticaloa, there are large estates where the nut is grown on the plantation system for export. There is already a larger area under the coconut palm in this form than under tea, and the coconut as a commercial product increases steadily in importance. It is interesting to note that it is the wealthier natives and not the foreign planters who are mainly responsible for the development of this profitable business. In the northern part of the island we find another species of palm tree, the 23 palmyra. This palm is almost as important to the Tamils who inhabit the district as the coconut is to the Sinhalese further south.

As we approach Kandy the scenery grows wilder and the hills steeper, and we may perhaps catch sight of a different kind of cultivation. Long rows of low bushy plants are growing in the fields, and scores of dark brown natives, men, women and children, are picking the leaves. We are entering the 24 tea-planting district. In the distance is the planter’s house and near it the sheds where the leaf is dried and packed for 25 the market.

Here and there, in this part of our journey, we may notice stretches of desolate scrub breaking up the forest area. A century ago there was a continuous belt of forest between Kandy and the lowlands, jealously preserved by the native kings as a barrier against the invader; now only patches of this remain. The native has a method of cultivation styled _chena_: this consists in burning a piece of the forest, cultivating it for a year or two and then moving on to a new patch. The trees do not grow again, but a low scrub springs up, useless for any purpose. When the Government interfered with this wasteful practice the damage was past repair.

We now reach Kandy, a beautiful old-world town, set in the forest high up among the hills, and full of relics of past 26 history. Here we see it, looking across the artificial lake on which it stands; and here is one of its streets. The people 27 in this district are old-fashioned and little touched by foreign influence. They still retain many of the old feudal ideas. Here we have a group of chiefs, in the picturesque native 28 dress, though the effect is rather spoilt by the clothes of the Europeans; and here is a portrait of a chief showing his 29 dress of ceremony with its elaborate ornaments. These dignified chiefs are very different from the native as we saw him at Colombo. All round us are ruins of temples and public buildings, often half buried in the jungle; but we can still see the 30 Audience Hall of the old kings of Kandy, with its carved wooden pillars. It is now used as a modern Court of Justice.

The Kandyans have a long and notable history behind them. Two thousand five hundred years ago, according to native tradition, a prince from the Ganges Valley reached Ceylon and established himself as king. The invaders were tillers of the soil, and their rulers have left monuments of their energy in the many ruins of irrigation tanks dotted about the dry northern part of the island. They were not for long left undisturbed in their conquest. From time to time the land was raided by the people of Southern India, and the history of the kingdoms of Ceylon is largely a series of wars. We can trace the gradual progress of the later invaders in the removal of the Sinhalese capital further and further south; first, from the coast to Anuradhapura, then to Polonnaruwa, and so on to Kandy, and finally to Cotta, now a suburb of Colombo. As the result of this movement, the southwest district is to-day occupied mainly by Sinhalese, who form two-thirds of the native population, while the northern part is peopled by Tamils who belong in language, race and religion to Southern India. The Chinese, who for many centuries traded with Ceylon and at one time conquered it and carried away the reigning king, have left no traces; not so the Arab traders of the West. Their Mohammedan descendants still form a large part of the population on the coast, especially on the east side, and throughout the island they are the shopmen and traders in nearly every village. So we have Tamils in the north. Sinhalese in the south and Moormen everywhere; and all mingled together with Europeans, Burghers and half-castes in the coast ports and Colombo. There is one other race which we must not forget. In the jungle of the wild Eastern Province are to be found the Veddas, the dying remnant of the people who occupied Ceylon before the coming of the Sinhalese. There are less than four thousand of these curious people in the island and their number is dwindling steadily. Not all are equally backward. Some of them practise a rude form of agriculture in the forest clearings and build 31 rough huts such as we see here. Others are still cave-dwellers, living on wild game which they hunt with bows and arrows. 32 Here we have one of their rock shelters and here a group of 33 men with their weapons.

There is a variety of religions corresponding to the variety of races. The Sinhalese are Buddhists; they date their conversion from the visit of a disciple of Buddha two thousand two hundred years ago, and the island abounds in proofs of their thorough adoption of the creed. In Kandy itself we have the famous 34 temple of the Tooth. Here is a general view from the outside. We pass through the entrance gate of massive stone, with 35 finely carved doors; but the temple within, of which we see 36 a corner here, is not imposing according to our ideas, in spite of its great sanctity in the Buddhist world; while the tooth is a piece of ivory which never came out of a human jaw. We shall see more of such sacred remains as we journey northwards, to the lower country and the older capitals of the kingdom, and chief among them Anuradhapura. Everywhere are ruins of old monuments half buried in the jungle; a sudden turn may often bring us to a gigantic image of Buddha, carved out of the solid rock, or to 37 one of the curious _dagobas_,--bell-shaped solid erections of brick or stone, sometimes plastered with lime. Each one of these is supposed to contain some sacred relic of Buddha. Nearly every temple has its _dagoba_, together with a _wihara_ or image house, a _Bo_ tree surrounded by a platform, and a _pansala_ or house for the priests. In Anuradhapura are to be found some of the most famous of these shrines. Here is the Ruanweli, about two 38 thousand years old, still visited by crowds of devout 39 worshippers; and here is a nearer view. Again we have the 40 Thuparama, shining brightly in its coat of lime plaster; it is the oldest and most sacred of all, and was built by one of the kings to contain the collar bone of Buddha. Not far away is 41 a remarkable rock temple, the Isurumuniya; in the foreground we see the high priest with his long wand of office, and beyond is another _dagoba_. From the summit of the rock above the temple we can look far and wide over the ancient city, with its ruins of palaces and temples half buried in the trees, and imagine something of the life of its first builders. Here is one of 42 these fragments; notice the finely carved moonstone at the foot of the steps.

But the most remarkable relic of the past is not of brick or stone; it is a tree, the _Bo_ tree, sacred beyond all others, since tradition asserts that it sprang from a branch of the very tree under which, at Gaya in the Ganges Valley, Gautama attained his Buddhahood. If this be really the tree planted in the year 288 B.C., it is one of the oldest in the world with a recorded history. At the entrance to the sacred enclosure we pass 43 the stalls of the sellers of lotos blossoms which the pilgrims buy to offer at the shrine. Inside is the tree with its 44 raised terrace and altars piled with flowers, its priests 45 and groups of worshippers at prayer. It is a very different scene from the Hindu temple or Mohammedan mosque.

In many of the old buildings of the Sinhalese kingdom there are elaborate carvings and paintings; here we have a fine 46 specimen of an interior. Both the buildings and their ornaments prove that the people were well advanced in some of the arts of civilization. But the native arts and crafts are almost dead, killed by foreign trade and cheap goods. We may still see at 47 Kandy the weaving of the native or _Dumbara_ cloths, and 48 the working in silver and brass; but these are barely kept alive by people interested in the past. The Sinhalese generally have no industries apart from agriculture, and even in this they keep to the old and primitive methods and crops, leaving to Europeans, aided by imported Tamil coolies, the real agricultural development of the country. The next generation may see a change, as the Sinhalese of to-day are learning to appreciate the value of education. There are over a quarter of a million children attending the schools provided or supported by the Government, and a beginning has also been made with technical training. Here we have a village school, with the classes being held in the 49 open air, as the building is too small for the crowd of 50 scholars. But it takes many years of education to change the ideas and habits of a conservative people, and it will be long before the familiar figure of the professional letter-writer 51 disappears from the steps of the post office.

We must look for modern progress not in the ruined cities but in the new plantation districts of the hill country. The railway will again carry us in comfort through the slopes of the planting country to Niuwara Eliya, up in the clouds, six thousand feet above the sea, the health resort of the planters and European residents.

The prosperity of Ceylon to-day is largely due to the British planter. The plantation industry started not with tea but with coffee. Though it was grown by the Dutch in the lowlands, coffee was of small importance until its introduction into the hill country, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As the interior was opened up the crop increased rapidly, so that, by 1870, Ceylon was exporting over a million hundredweight, as compared with thirty thousand in 1837. Prices were high, the railway to Kandy had recently been opened, new estates were being planted, and every one thought that the future of coffee-growing was assured. But at the very moment of greatest prosperity came the first sign of the ruin of the industry. A minute fungus appeared on the plants in some districts and began to spread steadily. At first little notice was taken of the disease; but it gradually extended to one estate after another and no remedy could be found; while Brazil, which was free from the pest, poured supplies of coffee into the markets of the world and sent down prices to their old level. A series of very wet seasons completed the work begun by the fungus.

The planters did not despair. They experimented with new products, such as cinchona, until they again produced too much for the market; but it was tea which in the end saved Ceylon. The tea-plant was hardier than coffee and was found to be well suited to the climate of the hill country, with its alternations of rain and sunshine. As soon as the planters were convinced of its value, large areas were planted with tea, so that between 1876 and 1886 the crop rose from eight to eighty million pounds in weight. By the end of the century it had doubled again and entirely displaced coffee as the staple crop of the island. The whole industry has developed independently of the native Sinhalese, by means of foreign capital, foreign direction and foreign labour; even the very food for the coolies must be brought in by sea, since the Sinhalese agriculturalists produce little more than they need for themselves. But the planters are not repeating their former mistake; they are experimenting with other crops besides tea, as cacao and rubber; the latter especially seems to have a good prospect in the future. The Government also is assisting in the work. In the beautiful gardens at Peradeniya, near Kandy, we may see a bewildering 52 variety of plants. Here is the native bamboo and the curious 53 talipot palm, which blooms only once after many years and 54 then dies; here is a specimen in bloom. The leaves of this palm have a special interest, since they are used like parchment for writing on; so that the native book takes the curious form which we see in this picture. Here, too, are all kinds of 55 foreign plants being grown to test their fitness for cultivation in the island. It was in the low-country gardens, connected with Peradeniya, that the Para rubber tree was first introduced from Brazil and many experiments made to discover the best methods of growth and tapping.