The history of Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka, an island off the southern tip of India, has one of the longest recorded histories in South Asia, preserved in Buddhist chronicles that trace its kings back more than two thousand years. The great irrigation civilisations of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa made the island a centre of Theravada Buddhism, while close ties with southern India brought Tamil kingdoms, Hindu culture and repeated invasions. From the sixteenth century the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally the British took control of the island, which the British ruled as Ceylon. Independence in 1948 was followed by deepening conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, a civil war that lasted until 2009, and an economic crisis in 2022 that brought down a government.

Humans have lived on the island for tens of thousands of years. Caves such as Fa-Hien Lena and Batadombalena have yielded remains of anatomically modern people dated to as early as about 37,000 years ago, known collectively as Balangoda Man, along with some of the earliest microlithic stone tools found anywhere. These hunter-gatherers lived in the rainforests and hills, and the Veddas, or Wanniyala-Aetto, who still live in parts of the interior, are generally thought to be descended from them.

Settled farming, iron working and pottery appeared in the first millennium BCE, linked to the megalithic cultures of southern India; excavations at Anuradhapura show an urban settlement developing there by about the fifth century BCE. The Buddhist chronicles describe the island before the coming of Indo-Aryan settlers as the land of the Yakkhas and Nagas, names that may preserve memories of earlier peoples.

The Mahavamsa, a Pali chronicle compiled around the fifth century CE, begins Sinhalese history with Prince Vijaya, an exile from northern India who is said to have landed with 700 followers on the day of the Buddha's death, traditionally 543 BCE. The story is legendary, but it reflects the arrival of speakers of an Indo-Aryan language that became Sinhala. Dravidian-speaking peoples from southern India, ancestors of the Tamils, were also present from early times, and the island was multi-ethnic for as far back as the evidence reaches.

Anuradhapura became the capital in the fourth century BCE and remained so for some 1,400 years. Under King Devanampiya Tissa, a contemporary of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, Ashoka's son Mahinda brought Buddhism to the island in the third century BCE, and a cutting from the Bodhi tree, still venerated at Anuradhapura, was planted there. Kings built vast stupas such as the Ruwanwelisaya and great monasteries such as the Mahavihara and Abhayagiri. Around 29 BCE monks at Aluvihara wrote down the Theravada scriptures, the Pali Canon, for the first time. The chronicles celebrate King Dutugamunu, who in about 161 BCE defeated the Tamil ruler Elara, remembered as a just king, and united the island.

The kingdom's wealth rested on irrigation. Kings built huge reservoirs, called tanks, and canals that allowed rice to be grown through the dry season across the northern plains. Ships from the Roman Empire, Persia, India and China called at the island's ports for pearls, gems, ivory and cinnamon. In the late fifth century King Kashyapa I built a fortified palace on top of the rock of Sigiriya, decorated with frescoes and approached through water gardens.

Anuradhapura was often drawn into the politics of southern India, and Pandya and Pallava rulers intervened in its succession disputes. In 993 the Chola dynasty under Rajaraja I invaded, and by 1017 his son Rajendra I had captured the king and taken most of the island, which became a Chola province governed from Polonnaruwa. Anuradhapura was never again the capital.

Sinhalese resistance continued from Ruhuna in the south, and in 1070 Vijayabahu I expelled the Cholas and ruled from Polonnaruwa. The kingdom reached its height under Parakramabahu I, who reigned from 1153 to 1186, unified the island, reformed the Buddhist monastic order, built the great reservoir known as the Sea of Parakrama and sent expeditions to southern India and to Burma. His successor Nissanka Malla left inscriptions across the island, but after him the kingdom declined.

In 1215 the invader Kalinga Magha seized Polonnaruwa and ruled harshly. Over the following centuries the centres of Sinhalese power moved south-west, to Dambadeniya, Yapahuwa, Kurunegala, Gampola and finally Kotte near modern Colombo, and the dry-zone irrigation works were largely abandoned. In the north a Tamil kingdom ruled by the Aryacakravarti dynasty emerged in the thirteenth century, centred on the Jaffna peninsula, at times strong enough to collect tribute from the south. The Vanni chiefs held the forested lands between. In the thirteenth century Chandrabhanu, a king from Tambralinga on the Malay Peninsula, then within the orbit of Srivijaya, invaded twice.

The island remained a meeting point of the Indian Ocean. Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta described its rubies and its sacred peak, Adam's Peak, revered by Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. Muslim traders, ancestors of many Sri Lankan Moors, settled along the coasts. In 1411 the Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He fought a local ruler and carried him captive to China; a stone tablet he left at Galle in 1409 is inscribed in Chinese, Tamil and Persian. Parakramabahu VI of Kotte briefly reunited the whole island, including Jaffna, in the fifteenth century.

The Portuguese Empire reached the island in 1505, when a fleet under Lourenço de Almeida arrived at a time when the Kotte kingdom was weakening. The Portuguese built a fort at Colombo in 1517 and exploited the division of Kotte among three brothers in 1521 to make themselves arbiters of the island's politics. The last king of Kotte, a Catholic convert, bequeathed his realm to the King of Portugal, and in 1619 the Portuguese also annexed Jaffna. They controlled the coastal lowlands and the cinnamon trade, converted many coastal people to Catholicism and destroyed many Buddhist and Hindu temples.

In the central highlands the Kingdom of Kandy, established at the end of the sixteenth century, held out. Its kings kept the Tooth Relic of the Buddha, the symbol of legitimate kingship, and defeated several Portuguese invasions in the mountains.

In 1638 King Rajasinghe II of Kandy allied with the Dutch East India Company, the trading arm of the Dutch Republic, to expel the Portuguese. The Dutch took Colombo in 1656 and Jaffna in 1658, but then kept the coastal territories for themselves rather than handing them to Kandy. For almost 150 years they ruled the coast, monopolising cinnamon, introducing Roman-Dutch law, which survives in Sri Lankan civil law, and leaving the Burgher community of mixed European descent. Kandy remained independent, ruled from 1739 by a dynasty of South Indian Nayak origin.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain occupied the Dutch possessions in 1796 to keep them out of French hands, and in 1802 the Treaty of Amiens made the coastal provinces the Crown colony of Ceylon within the British Empire. A British invasion of Kandy in 1803 ended in disaster, but in 1815, with the support of Kandyan nobles opposed to their king, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the British took the kingdom and by the Kandyan Convention became rulers of the whole island for the first time. A rebellion in Uva in 1817 and 1818 was put down with great brutality, and another in Matale in 1848 was also suppressed.

The colonial economy was built on plantations. Coffee boomed in the highlands until a leaf disease destroyed it in the 1870s, and tea, followed by rubber and coconut, replaced it. Hundreds of thousands of Tamil labourers were brought from southern India to work the estates in harsh conditions, forming a distinct community from the long-established Tamils of the north and east. The Colebrooke-Cameron reforms of 1833 unified the administration, and English-language schools created a new elite of Sinhalese, Tamils and Burghers. A Buddhist revival led by figures such as Anagarika Dharmapala, and Hindu and Muslim revivals alongside it, accompanied growing political consciousness.

Constitutional reform came gradually. The Donoughmore Constitution of 1931 introduced universal adult suffrage, among the first in any Asian colony, and a State Council with Ceylonese ministers. During the Second World War, Ceylon was a vital Allied base, Japanese aircraft bombed Colombo and Trincomalee in April 1942, and Lord Mountbatten's South East Asia Command was headquartered at Kandy. After the war, and following the independence of India, Britain negotiated a peaceful transfer of power with D. S. Senanayake's United National Party.

Ceylon became an independent dominion on 4 February 1948 with Senanayake as prime minister. One of the new parliament's first acts, the citizenship laws of 1948 and 1949, left most Indian Tamil plantation workers stateless and without the vote. In 1956 S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike won power on a wave of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism and passed the Sinhala Only Act, making Sinhala the sole official language. Tamil protests were met with violence, including anti-Tamil riots in 1956 and 1958. Bandaranaike was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959, and in 1960 his widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, became the world's first woman prime minister.

In 1971 the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a Marxist movement of rural Sinhalese youth, launched an uprising that was crushed with thousands of deaths. A new constitution in 1972 made the country the Republic of Sri Lanka and gave Buddhism the "foremost place". Policies limiting Tamil students' access to universities and state jobs deepened Tamil grievances, and in 1976 the main Tamil parties adopted a demand for an independent state, Tamil Eelam. J. R. Jayawardene, elected in 1977, opened the economy to foreign investment and in 1978 introduced a powerful executive presidency.

In July 1983 the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed thirteen soldiers near Jaffna, and in the anti-Tamil pogrom that followed, known as Black July, mobs killed hundreds and by some estimates thousands of Tamils and destroyed Tamil homes and businesses. Tens of thousands of Tamils fled abroad, and the conflict became a full civil war. Under the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 an Indian peacekeeping force was deployed in the north and east, where it ended up fighting the LTTE before withdrawing in 1990. At the same time a second JVP insurrection in the south, from 1987 to 1989, was crushed by the security forces and death squads, with tens of thousands killed or disappeared.

The LTTE became one of the most formidable insurgent groups in the world, with its own navy and suicide units. It was responsible for the assassination of the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and of President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993, for bombings of civilians and for the expulsion of Muslims from the north in 1990. A Norwegian-brokered ceasefire in 2002 broke down, and on 26 December 2004 the Indian Ocean tsunami killed more than 30,000 people along the island's coasts. President Mahinda Rajapaksa, elected in 2005, pursued a military solution, and in May 2009 government forces overran the last LTTE territory in the north-east and killed its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The war killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people. The final months were especially deadly for civilians trapped between the two sides, and a UN panel in 2011 cited credible reports that tens of thousands may have died. Both the army and the LTTE have been accused of war crimes, including the shelling of civilians, executions and the LTTE's use of civilians as human shields; the government rejected many of the allegations and resisted international investigations, while some Tamil groups describe the events as genocide.

The Rajapaksa government rebuilt roads and ports, often with Chinese loans, but was criticised for the growing power of the president's family. Maithripala Sirisena defeated Rajapaksa in 2015. On Easter Sunday, 21 April 2019, suicide bombers linked to a local Islamist group attacked churches and hotels, killing more than 260 people. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former defence secretary and Mahinda's brother, won the presidency later that year.

Tax cuts, mounting foreign debt, the collapse of tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic and a sudden ban on chemical fertilisers led to the worst economic crisis since independence. In 2022 the country defaulted on its foreign debt and suffered shortages of fuel, food and medicine. Months of mass protests, known as the Aragalaya or "struggle", culminated on 9 July 2022 when protesters stormed the presidential residence in Colombo; Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to the Maldives and then resigned, and parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe as president, who agreed an IMF rescue. In September 2024 the left-wing leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidential election, and in November his National People's Power alliance won a two-thirds majority in parliament, displacing the parties that had governed since independence.