When the first Portuguese ships anchored off Colombo in 1505, they entered an island already divided among rival kingdoms, Sinhalese Kotte in the south-west, Tamil Jaffna in the north, and, in the central mountains, the kingdom of Kandy. Over the next four and a half centuries, three European powers would fight for the coast and its spices, while Kandy held out in the highlands. The Ceylon they built, its forts and canals, churches and railways, and above all its tea, still shapes the country a traveller sees today.
A timeline of colonial Ceylon
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1505 | The Portuguese land near Colombo, drawn by cinnamon |
| 1594–1619 | Portugal conquers the Kotte and Jaffna kingdoms |
| 1638–1658 | The Dutch VOC, allied with Kandy, drives out the Portuguese |
| 1796 | Britain seizes the Dutch coastal territories |
| 1802 | Ceylon becomes a British Crown Colony |
| 1815 | The Kandyan Convention ends the last independent kingdom |
| 1817–1818 | The Uva–Wellassa rebellion is crushed |
| 1867 | James Taylor makes the first commercial tea planting |
| 1948 | Ceylon gains independence |
The Portuguese: cinnamon and the cross
The Portuguese came for the world’s finest cinnamon, which grew wild along the south-western coast. At first they traded, building a fort at Colombo, but they were soon drawn into the island’s dynastic wars. By playing rival princes against one another they absorbed the coastal kingdom of Kotte, and in 1619 they conquered the northern Tamil kingdom of Jaffna as well.
Portuguese rule was intense but shallow, confined to the coast and lasting little more than a century in most places. They fortified Colombo and Galle, imposed a monopoly on the cinnamon trade, and pressed Roman Catholicism on the coastal population, a faith that endures strongly today among the fishing communities of the west coast, along with Portuguese surnames such as Perera, Fernando and de Silva and a scattering of loan-words in Sinhala. But they never took the highlands. The kings of Kandy, protected by forest and mountain, repelled every Portuguese expedition sent against them.
The Dutch: canals, law and the VOC
Kandy’s answer to Portugal was to invite in a rival. In the 1630s the king allied with the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, a vast commercial corporation, promising it the cinnamon trade in return for help against the Portuguese. The Dutch obliged, capturing Galle in 1640, Colombo in 1656 and Jaffna in 1658, and then, to Kandy’s dismay, kept the coast for themselves.
Dutch rule lasted from 1658 to 1796 and was more systematic than the Portuguese had been. The VOC rebuilt Galle Fort into the magnificent walled town that survives today, dug a network of canals through the lagoons around Colombo and Negombo to move goods, and drew up a legal code. That Roman-Dutch law still forms part of Sri Lanka’s legal system, alongside a body of Dutch-descended settlers, the Burghers, and the sober Reformed churches of Galle and Colombo. Yet the Dutch, too, ruled only the coast, and their monopoly bred smuggling and resentment among the very people whose cinnamon it depended on.
The British: one island, and the age of tea
When France overran the Netherlands in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain moved to keep the Dutch possessions out of French hands and took the Ceylon coast in 1796. In 1802 Ceylon became a Crown Colony, and in 1815 the British did what neither of their predecessors had managed: they deposed the last king of Kandy under the Kandyan Convention and brought the whole island under a single government for the first time in more than three centuries. A fierce rebellion in the Kandyan provinces in 1817–18 was crushed with great severity.
British Ceylon was reshaped for export. The colonial government drove roads into the highlands, laid a railway from Colombo up to Kandy and on through the mountains, and cleared vast tracts of hill forest for plantations. Coffee came first and boomed, until a leaf-rust fungus, Hemileia vastatrix, ruined the crop from 1869. Planters turned to tea, following the Scot James Taylor, who had made the first commercial planting at Loolecondera estate near Kandy in 1867. Ceylon tea conquered the world’s teacups; rubber and coconut filled out the plantation economy. Much of the landscape travellers now admire in the hill country, the terraced estates, the highland railways, the bungalows of Ella and Nuwara Eliya, dates from this era.
The human cost
That prosperity rested on imported labour. To pick the tea the British brought hundreds of thousands of Tamil workers from southern India, who laboured under harsh conditions on the estates. Their descendants, the Up-country Tamils, remain a distinct community, and independence left many of them stateless, a grievance not fully settled until decades later. The plantation economy also drew the highlands and lowlands into an unequal export trade, and colonial policies of divide-and-rule sharpened the ethnic tensions that would trouble the independent nation.
The British left in 1948, and Ceylon became Sri Lanka, a republic, in 1972. What the empires left behind is everywhere: the tea in the cup, the churches and forts, the railways, the legal code, the cricket, the very layout of Colombo’s old Fort district. It is a legacy to admire and to weigh honestly in the same breath. The story continues in Independence and Modern Sri Lanka, while the free kingdom that outlasted the Europeans has its own chapter in The Kandyan Kingdom.
Where to walk through colonial Ceylon today
Four and a half centuries of European rule are written into Sri Lanka's coasts, cities and highlands. These are the places where a traveller can still walk through colonial Ceylon today.
- 1
Galle Fort
The great Dutch stronghold on the south coast, a whole seventeenth-century walled town of ramparts, cobbled lanes, churches and villas, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. First fortified by the Portuguese in 1588 and rebuilt by the Dutch, it is the finest colonial monument on the island.
- 2
Colombo's Fort & Pettah
The commercial heart the Europeans built. The old Fort district, the restored Dutch Hospital shopping precinct, colonial churches and grand banks sit beside the bustle of the Pettah bazaar, the layered capital the empires left behind.
- 3
The hill-country tea estates
The rolling green plantations around Nuwara Eliya, Hatton and Ella are the colonial economy made landscape. Many estates still welcome visitors to tour the factories and taste the leaf where Ceylon tea was born.
- 4
Nuwara Eliya
The highland town the British made in their own image, all half-timbered bungalows, a racecourse, a golf club and rose gardens, a piece of transplanted England at 1,900 metres, nicknamed 'Little England' to this day.
- 5
Dutch Reformed Church, Galle
Built in 1755 inside Galle Fort, its floor paved with the carved gravestones of Dutch settlers. Colombo's Wolvendaal Church of 1749 is its grand sister, both among the oldest Protestant churches in Asia.
- 6
The main-line railway
The British-built line climbing from Kandy through the tea hills to Ella and Badulla, laid to carry the crop down to Colombo. Crossing the Nine Arch Bridge, it is now rated among the most scenic train journeys on earth.
- 7
Jaffna & the north
The old Portuguese and Dutch fort at Jaffna, badly damaged in the civil war and now restored, marks the northern edge of the colonial coast and the Tamil heartland of the island.
- 8
Mannar & the pearl coast
The remote north-west, where the Portuguese and Dutch worked the famed pearl fisheries and where the Dutch left another star-shaped fort and the island's oldest baobab tree.