Ceylon, which takes the first place among our Crown Colonies, is the halfway house on our long journey. As we steam towards Colombo there is little to suggest that we are nearing one of the chief harbours in the eastern world. We see a long unbroken line of coast, fringed with green coconut palms, with no trace of bay or inlet. In the background rises an irregular hill mass, 1 topped with long ridges and sharp peaks. Presently we can distinguish two great breakwaters, with a wide opening between. The southwest wind is blowing and huge waves are dashing over them, throwing up masses of foam as high as the masts of the vessels which lie inside in a great basin, calm as a lake, a mile and a half long and over half a mile wide. Here is a safe anchorage 2 for a fleet, with coaling jetties and a dry dock which can take the largest vessel afloat.

Like so many modern seaports Colombo owes everything to engineering. Forty years ago the roadstead was open to the swell from the southwest, except for the shelter of the little headland from which the main breakwater now juts out. In those days our vessel would have called at Galle, a hundred miles away at the southern corner of the island. We can journey to Galle now by 3 railway along the coast, through interminable groves of coconut palms, with glimpses of the sea breaking on the coral reefs on our right and Adam’s peak rising into the clouds on our left. Galle was in early times the chief port of the island, the meeting point of Arab traders from the west and Chinese from the east; it is a picturesque, old-world town, with many relics of the Dutch occupation; but Colombo has now taken its place as the commercial centre. Here is a view of the Galle 4 lighthouse, taken from the walls of the old Dutch fortifications; the building behind the palms is a new Mohammedan mosque. In a quiet corner we see native 5 fishing boats, with more palms in the background. Here again is a Hindu temple, dating from the time of the 6 Dutch occupation; the lions over the gate may perhaps have been copied from some European coat-of-arms, as they look rather different from the usual native devices.

Far away in the northeast is Trincomali, a vast landlocked 7 bay, with unlimited deep and safe anchorage, the only good natural harbour in the island, in fact one of the best natural harbours in the whole world. Here was for many years the headquarters of the Navy in Indian waters; but it is out of the track of steamers and away from the capital, so that it has now been dismantled by the Admiralty. The Navy has followed to Colombo the commerce which depends on it for protection, and Trincomali, in spite of its great natural advantages, has sunk back to the position of a third-rate local port.

Before we start on our tour let us study the map and 8 form some 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 9 our landing 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, 10 in its most elaborate form, in the portrait of a high-caste Sinhalese; and we notice that, except for the comb, he 11 wears 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. 12 Finally, we have a picture of a typical Sinhalese girl of the lower class.

Then we come on a group of dark-brown men wearing loincloths and turbans and repairing the 13 roadway with pick and shovel; these are Tamil coolies from Southern India, doing the heavy work of the 14 town. Another trots in the shafts of a ricksha, 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 15 carts, thatched with 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 16 them into the Pettah, or native quarter, with its trams and rickshas and busy shops. Here we see the carts 17 collected in the open market place, and in the streets we 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 18 our way back we pass a Hindu temple, which reminds us 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 19 are the dhobies or native washermen at work. The lake is 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 20 Negombo. 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 21 plough, drawn by water buffaloes, which are used 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 22 on a native village 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 23 tree, the 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 24 leaves. We are entering the tea-planting district. In the distance is the planter’s house and near it the sheds 25 where the leaf is dried and packed for 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 26 of past history. Here we see it, looking across the artificial lake on which it stands; and here is one of its 27 streets. The people 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 28 chiefs, in the picturesque native dress, though the effect is rather spoilt by the clothes of the Europeans; and 29 here is a portrait of a chief showing his 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 30 we can still see the 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 31 and build rough huts such as we see here. Others are still cave-dwellers, living on wild game which they hunt 32 with bows and arrows. Here we have one of their rock shelters and here a group of men with their weapons. 33

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 34 itself we have the famous temple of the Tooth. Here is a general view from the outside. We pass through the 35 entrance gate of massive stone, with finely carved doors; but the temple within, of which we see a corner here, is not 36 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 37 image of Buddha, carved out of the solid rock, or to 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. 38 In Anuradhapura are to be found some of the most famous of these shrines. Here is the Ruanweli, about two 39 thousand years old, still visited by crowds of devout 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. 41 Not far away is 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 42 is one of 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. 43 At the entrance to the sacred enclosure we pass the stalls of the sellers of lotos blossoms which the pilgrims buy 44 to offer at the shrine. Inside is the tree with its raised terrace and altars piled with flowers, its priests and 45 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 46 have a fine 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 the working in silver and brass; but these are 48 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 49 have a village school, with the classes being held in the 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 51 letter-writer 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 52 Peradeniya, near Kandy, we may see a bewildering variety of plants. Here is the native bamboo and the 53 curious talipot palm, which blooms only once after many years and then dies; here is a specimen in bloom. The 54 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 55 picture. Here, too, are all kinds of 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.

The tea plant and rubber tree need plenty of warmth and moisture for their growth, and these conditions are 56 only to be found in part of Ceylon. In Colombo it is hot and wet for the greater part of the year, but in the early spring, though still hot, it is dry. Over all the lowlands there is no winter and summer in our sense of the terms, but only alternations of wet and dry. In the hills it is cooler than on the plains, though there is even more rain; but mainly owing to the structure of Ceylon the wet and dry seasons occur at different times of the year in different districts. The district near Colombo has most of its rain when the Southwest Monsoon blows from the sea in the summer; in the north and east of the island the winter is the wet season, when the northeast wind comes down from the Bay of Bengal. Here the rainy period is shorter than in the southwest, so that the total fall in the year is less, and the whole country is drier. The highland ridges, running from northwest to southeast, at right angles to the course of the winds, form a rough barrier and division between the two kinds of climate. At Niuwara Eliya we are not far from the dividing line. We may drive across a ridge or pass through a tunnel, leaving clouds and heavy rain behind us, and come out into clear skies and bright sunshine. 57 The whole face of the country changes; in place of forest, plantation and waterfalls, such as we see here, we 58 find open moor and grassland, or patana, with cattle grazing as on our own moors. The contrast of seasons 59 is so strong that the flowering periods of many plants on opposite sides of the mountains are six months apart, as they depend on variations of moisture rather than of temperature.

We have been travelling through many miles of cultivated land on a comfortable railway; yet in this same district, in the early nineteenth century, our soldiers on the march to Kandy had to hew a path through the jungle and sling the heavy guns from tree to tree. The railway now extends from one end of the island to the other; off the main routes we find good roads on which 60 coaches run; here is one of them carrying the mails, though its appearance does not suggest very rapid or comfortable travelling. Along many of the chief routes motor-cars now run. Improved means of communication have opened up the interior to the planters and enabled them to reach foreign markets with their products, and have given us that effective control of the whole island which was never attained by the Portuguese or Dutch. The history and progress of Ceylon under British rule is bound up with the making of roads and the building of bridges. With the coming of the road and the railway the elephant has declined in importance, though he is one of the most valuable products of the jungle and one of the oldest articles of export. Elephants still exist in large numbers in the island, but they are for the most part kept by the native chiefs for ornamental and ceremonial purposes, especially in connexion with religious processions. Here 61 is a picture of the last great drive; in the background are the wild elephants just driven into the enclosure, while those in the foreground are tame and trained to assist in reducing the new captures to order.

The wealth and progress of Ceylon depend upon its crops, and the crops can neither be grown nor marketed without means of transport; but the first condition of growth in a tropical region is the supply of water. We have seen how the early kings built great tanks or reservoirs for irrigation in the drier districts of the north, so that the land could support a large population. After the Tamil invasions these great works fell into decay and became choked with jungle; native villages were even built inside the old embankments. The Government is now reviving the policy of the past rulers, and as more and more of the irrigation works are restored the waste land of the north will be reclaimed and the face of the country will change. At present, though Ceylon is purely agricultural, with no manufacturing industries and only a little mining for gems and plumbago, yet the food for the towns and for the coolies on the plantations is brought over the sea. This is an unnatural state of affairs; with proper use of its great resources the island should be able to feed itself.

In the various works of improvement the Government has more often found the natives a hindrance than a help, and the administration is necessarily of the paternal type, though it is modified by the presence of the European planters and the large class of Burghers, or people of Dutch descent, in the population of the towns.

Ceylon may be taken as a good specimen of the most highly developed Crown Colony. It is ruled, under the British Colonial Office, by the Governor and his Executive Council, consisting of a few high officials. There is also a Legislative Council made up partly of officials, partly of representatives of the various races and interests. As the official element is always in a majority, the Council is an advisory rather than a controlling body, and does not in any way compare with our Parliament. The unofficial members of the Legislature were formerly nominated by the Governor, but the principle of election has recently been introduced.

The island is divided into provinces, each under the charge of a Government agent; but the unit of life among the agricultural Sinhalese is still the village community, and the villages are largely controlled on the native system through their own councils and headmen. We have interfered as little as possible with native customs or religion, and in the country districts the people still keep to their old methods of life. In one respect they have changed, and not for the better. Now that there is a settled system of law and justice, they have discovered a great fondness for litigation; and the intricacies of land tenure offer fine opportunities for the display of this trait.

We can make part of our return journey to the coast by boat, though only a short length of the rivers of the southwest is of any use for navigation. Our boat is a 62 curious double canoe with an awning of palm leaves, and our boatmen are Sinhalese and Tamils. We move 63 slowly down the Kalu Ganga, past wooded banks and palm groves, with here and there water buffalo or elephants 64 bathing, or a native asleep in a curious shelter raised on poles above the ground; and so back again to Colombo and its cosmopolitan crowd.