Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / Secret Kandy Part 5 | The 200-Year-Long War
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- Secret Kandy Part 5 | The 200-Year-Long War Protected by a necklace of high mountains and surrounded by dense jungle ideal for guerrilla warfare, the Kandyan kingdom’s natural defences helped it withstand repeated invasions. But what was this long-forgotten mountain war, fought for almost 200 years? Hills are, of course, what Kandy is celebrated for - and its most famous city-centre mountain, Bahirawa Kanda, or Gnome Mountain, is home to one of the tallest statues of Lord Buddha. It was once, more memorably, home to an atypical human sacrifice involving a lovely girl, Dingiri Menika, who lived right next to the Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in Galagedera. Selected to stimulate the moribund fertility of a Kandyan queen, the girl was kidnapped by soldiers, loaded with jasmine, and propelled with elephants, drummers, and banner-bearers to a stake for overnight consumption by demons. Quite why anyone thought a feast such as this might make the despondent queen procreate is a mystery. Fortunately, the king’s elephant keeper got to Dingiri Menika first, rescued her, married her, and set up home with her in Welligalle Maya, on Cross Street, close to Kandy Super Phone, Ltd, a present-day mobile phone supplier. But although the king, Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, chose to terminate all future human sacrifice, his late-burgeoning liberal values were not destined to bring him any greater luck. Within a few years, he had been exiled to India, along with at least two of his four wives, the third of whom was to use her exile for bankrupting shopping sprees. Protected by a necklace of high mountains - Alagalla Mountains, Bible Rock, Uthuwankanda, Devanagala, Ambuluwawa, the Knuckles and Hanthana - and surrounded by dense jungle ideal for guerrilla warfare, the Kandyan kingdom’s natural defences helped it withstand repeated invasions. Secretive and defensive, forever on the alert, the kingdom guarded its independence with valiant and unrelenting focus. Such behaviour was not quite on a par with the fabled Sakoku isolationist policies that made the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate so famous until they were breached by American gunboats in 1853 – but it certainly had much in common with it. The Alagalla Mountains are a special trekkers’ paradise, offering its visitors a range of hardcore or easy treks. Its range of dry evergreen, montane, and sub-montane forests is home to many species of fauna and flora, including wild boar, monkeys, squirrel, anteaters, porcupine, monitor lizard, tortoise – but it is especially noted for its 50 recoded bird species, which include Sri Lankan junglefowls, Layard’s parakeets, and yellow-fronted barbets. A little over 15 miles from Alagalla is Bible Rock itself, a stunning example of a Table Mountain. Over 5,500 feet high, it has a curious open-book shape that inspired early Victorian missionaries to give it its canonical name. However, 300 years earlier, it served as a lookout post for the Kandyan kings, eager to spot the latest colonial invasions, especially those of the Portuguese. A classic series of bonfires, running from mountain to mountain, starting here and ending near Kandy, served as a trusted warning signal, just as the famous Armada Fire Beacons in England in 1588. Steep though the climb is, it doesn’t take long to get to the top – and one of the best views in the country. About 4 miles from Alagalla is the little town of Balana. The Balana pass, on the southern edge of the Alagalla Mountains, was the second of two critical entry points into the kingdom, the other being at Galagedera. “Balana” is the Sinhala word for” look-out,” and look out it did, commanding from its perch 2000 feet above sea level, a perfect view of the entire territory that any enemy would have to cross. Balana foiled a Portuguese invasion in 1593. Several later attempts by the Portuguese ended in the destruction of their armies, most notably at nearby Danthure. The political, military, and religious machinations that led to this point were as intricate and complicated as anything since the ascent of man. They involved the scandalous conversion of Buddhist kings to Catholicism, the betrayal of a kingdom, the reassertion of Buddhist militarism, the forcible marriage of the last dynastic princess to a succession of Kandyan kings, and the last great throw of the dice by the Portuguese to seize control of the entire island. Shameless cheek, betrayal, gorilla skirmishes from impenetrable jungle depths, abysmal weather and escalating terror marked the Danthure campaign. It was to end on the 8th of October 1594, the Portuguese army of twenty thousand men was reduced to just ninety-three at the battle of Danthure. The survivors were left wishing they had not outlived their compatriots as their noses, ears and genitals were severed. A memorial of sorts, even if only in the heads of passing guests, can be felt at the Danthure Rajamaha built centuries before the events that were to immortalise it occurred. Just a few years later, in 1603, another attempt was made. The Portuguese observer Queyroz wrote “the new fortalice of Balana stood on a lofty hill upon a rock on its topmost peak; and it was more strong by position than by art, with four bastions and one single gate; and for its defence within and without there was an arrayal of 8,000 men with two lines of stockade which protected them with its raised ground, and a gate at the foot of the rock and below one of the bastions which commanded the ascent by a narrow, rugged, steep, and long path cut in the Hill.” Three days of bitter fighting eventually led to its capitulation, the Portuguese conducting an exceptional Thanksgiving service in the fort, but it was a very short victory. Within days, the Portuguese had fled, their long retreat back to Colombo beset by guerrilla fighting. But by 1616, aided by the accent of Senerat, one of the few notably inept Kandyan monarchs, Balana was reoccupied by the Portuguese - and improved with a drawbridge over a moat, the addition of a large water tank for sieges and the clearing of trees to a distance of a musket shot. The fort's ruins remain to this day, most notably the foundations of the higher buildings, which are laid out in a quadrangular plan with three circular bastions. Parts of the lower fort are lost in the jungle - its many ramparts, ditches, and buildings. And it was here, around Balana, at the Battle of Gannoruwa, that the imperial ambitions of the Portuguese finally met their grim finale. The mercenary army of Diogo de Melo de Castro, the Portuguese Captain General, had marched up from Colombo a third time in 1638 to try to capture the Kandyan kingdom of Rajasinghe II. The king, sitting with deceptive and majestic leisureliness under the shade of a great tree, conducted the battle with razor-sharp stratagems. Weakened by mass desertions, just 33 Portuguese soldiers survived of the 4,000 that made up the army, almost all of them reduced to heads piled up before the victorious king. The king, with his alliance with the Dutch, had managed to drive the Portuguese from the island once and for all. This proved to be a mixed blessing as his dubious association merely saddled him with a new colonial occupier. The Dutch proved far more professional and ruthless than the Portuguese in pursuing their colonial mission. But Portugal’s failure marked the blossoming of the last kingdom - the kingdom of Kandy. The kingdom was to endure for over two hundred years, and to meet head-on the invasive forces of two more colonial armies – the Dutch and the British. And although it ultimately succumbed, betrayed more from within than without, it put up such a fight as to ensure the continued survival of the island’s culture until it could be better cherished after independence in 1948. And fight it did. The Kandyan kingdom, having seen off the Portuguese, next repulsed two major Dutch army attempts in 1764 and 1765, as well as one of the two British attempts. The last, in 1815, succeeded more through bribery than through military prowess. The British capture of Kandy brought to an end a war that had lasted for over 200 years, since the first full-scale Portuguese attack on the kingdom. It had been one of the longest wars in the world and, quite possibly, the longest in Asia. Throughout this time, the conflict had put the kingdom on a more or less permanent emergency footing, making it little short of a miracle for it to function effectively and flourish, still less to exist. Accessing the kingdom became an obsession after the British annexation. Roads became the new colonists’ first central fixation. Sri Lanka excels at the improbable and the unexpected - and close to Balana is a village that is, in its modest way, a beacon to this history of transportation on the island. Kadugannawa shot to modest fame in 1820, when the British, fresh from seizing the entire country and putting down a major rebellion, set about building a proper road to connect Colombo with Kandy. At the Kadugannawa Pass, they faced a rock of such magnitude that blasting it away or circumnavigating it was no option. Instead, an army of builders led by Captain Dawson of the Royal Engineers pieced a sufficiently large hole through it to allow horses and carriages access. Although Dawson died of a snake bite before the road was completed, the Captain was credited with building the island’s first modern highway, and, rather extraordinarily, his own workers clubbed together to make a tower in his memory, the Dawson Tower. Somewhat shakily, it still stands. As befits a location of such transportational importance, the country’s National Railway Museum is also located in Kadugannawa. The country’s first train ran in 1858, and the network now covers 1,500 kilometres, using a lock-and-block signalling system so antiquated that trainspotters mark the government as their number one travel destination to witness history in action. Harder critics argue that little has changed since 1858, not least because the railway department runs one of the country’s most significant deficits, averaging an annual loss of 45 billion rupees. But, as Senneca said, “it is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” And who can be poor who can ride in trains and carriages of such vintage beauty, with doors and windows open to catch the breeze; with food sellers who scamper up and down with doubtful offerings; and – from time to time - destinations that are all too briefly reached. All this history is celebrated at the Museum, home to innumerable old engines, locomotives, rail cars, trolleys, carriages, machinery, and equipment. Despite all this, the real and most secret glory of Kadugannawa is actually a bridge. Trainspotters, tourists and pontists flock like sheep to the Nine Arch Bridge, a viaduct built in 1919 between Ella and Demodara. But connoisseurs go to a smaller, older one much closer to home – the Triple Arches Bridge of Kadugannawa, built in 1887 when the first rail lines were being laid. Today, it is a dreamy ruin, its arches lost in the ever-encroaching jungle. Listen hard – for here you can still catch the chatter of long departed passengers heading to the hill country. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.