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The Sri Lanka Podcast: Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

The Sri Lanka Podcast: Complete Audio Books About Sri Lanka

By: The Ceylon Press
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 The Ceylon Press' Complete Audio Books tell the stories of some of Sri Lanka's most remarkable people, places, and events.Copyright 2025 The Ceylon Press Social Sciences Travel Writing & Commentary World
Episodes
  • The Jungle Spice Garden

    The Jungle Spice Garden
    Dec 14 2025
    Field guide; saga; pharmacy; pantry - this memoir of the Spice Garden at The Flame Tree Estate and Hotel in the jungle northwest of Kandy confirms that most elemental of Sri Lankan horticultural truths – that plants – all 7,500 of them found here – divide into just three categories. They are medicinal. They are edible. Or they are useless. Had we known this before things kicked off, life would have been much simpler, and plans far more straightforward. For, as with most plans, ours went off-mission within months, pursued across the neat pages of Excel by the best-intended of mission creeps. But God, as they say, is good; and no good God has much truck with plans of any sort. It took years to properly understand what a release this Plan Wilderness was, and just how unconditionally that most office Gulag of conditions had been trounced. Enslavement is a condition that takes time to undo. Even now, years later, I still place thankful and imaginary offerings of flowers and fruit before the altar of my imagined gods. As Mark Twain noted, “to succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.” Servitude had begun to slide off, albeit unnoticed, just after the ceremonial signing of deeds to buy Mudhenna Wallawwa, the ancient, crumbling plantation house and estate in the jungle northwest of Kandy. Over 30 people representing the sellers, attended by scores more, met in an echoing room around a table that must have been related in some complex wooden way to the State Banquet table in Windsor Castle. Signatories, witnesses, supporters, attestors, senior and junior legal counsels, tea bearers and not a few passers-by transmuted the transfer of a deed into a Dhurbar. The plantation came with twenty-five acres of land that had long since reverted to jungle, though rampant hints of what once grew in smug order (rubber, cocoa, coffee, coconut) could still be glimpsed. The estate had been abandoned during the 1988 JVP civil war, the family fleeing to the greater safety of Colombo. And, as with all things tropical, the land settled back comfortably into the loving hands of nature, with a sigh, as if all that building and harvesting, planting, and living was in some inexpressible way, a trifling and passing distraction, now best forgotten. But possessing land is habit-forming. And soon enough, our acquisition was followed by the purchase of more acres. And another house. Further acres, once part of the wider estate before Land Reforms decimated it, were incorporated on long-term rents until the estate had more than doubled in size, the various land parcels threaded together by the slimmest of jungle tracks. One large plot was planted with vegetable beds, but lay so close to a misbehaving river that the onions, carrots, and sweet potatoes had little choice but to fester and moulder. Another was set aside to grow sandalwood trees. This, as it turned out, was a poor choice. Glamorous though the trees undoubtedly are, keeping them in the style to which they wish to become accustomed is more complicated even than keeping a mistress in Paris. The slightest variation in water caused sulky dieback. The tree’s high-maintenance root system, which demanded the presence of other plant roots to attach to, meant a continual need to throw what amounted to hedonistic horticultural parties. When all that had been sorted, Sandalwood Spike Disease arrived. An entire valley was planted out with thousands of bananas, all of which succumbed to Fusarium wilt. Lemon grass was seeded on well-drained hill sides, most of which caught fire during the drought. Mushrooms, a great favourite of our auditor, were added - more out of good manners than any genuine attempt to be commercial. The old rubber terraces were entrusted to a horticultural bandit who lacerated the trees to produce quick flows of sap, injuring them for years to come. Terraces of new rubber trees were established. “Harvest the latex,” advised one enterprising land agent, “and move up the value chain.” Make didoes,” he went on to suggest: “the few on sale on the island are all expensive imports.” Greenhouses for tomatoes and peppers were built and grown for the Maldivian hotel market until Spotted Wilt Virus raced through the plants, leaving behind fruit only the angriest chef would use. Several acres' worth of nurseries to raise cinnamon, cloves, and erica nuts were built, the tiny plants intended for resale to the local agriculture board, though porcupines, gathering in force for nightly raids, had alternative ideas. As the estate’s plantation workers grew into a small army, supervisors with, it turned out, imperfect circadian rhythms, were recruited to manage and mentor the mildly mutinous troops. On the hottest days, sleeping under the shade of mango trees seemed the only option. One manager, tempted to distraction by thoughts of ill-got lucre, was later to be seen gazing woefully out from behind the bars of the castellated ...
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    1 hr and 56 mins
  • Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors

    Inside Kandy: A Guide for Curious Visitors
    Dec 14 2025
    Proper guidebooks to Kandy lay out, in fine anatomical detail, the history, economy, and topography of the place, its sites and services listed in a proper, functioning order. Sadly, this book does not do that. It is an improper guide, the documentation of a personal quest (sometimes a struggle) to understand a little of what really makes Kandy, Kandy; what is most especially worth seeing; and why. Kandy’s inimitable reputation belies the fact that the city is barely 500 years old, an adolescent in Sri Lankan terms, given that the country’s recorded history goes back with stylish ease for at least 2,500 years. Not that anyone dares tell Kandyites this particular fact. Kandy regards itself – and to be fair, is remarkably considered by much of the rest of the country – as Sri Lanka’s authentic and genuine soul. It's heart. This characteristic is not something acquired merely because it houses the island’s most precious possession – the tooth of Lord Buddha. It is also due to the city’s record of withstanding wave after wave of colonial invasions. Kandy was the last island kingdom to fall to foreigners. By the time of its formal capture, in 1815, it had already resisted and survived over 300 years of colonial rule that had engulfed the rest of the island. For over 3 centuries, the kingdom held firm. In doing so, it was able to foster, protect, and develop the distinctive Singhala culture that had once permeated the entire island. It kept the light burning. But it was ever a culture under threat. From the arrival of the first European soldiers, administrators, priests, businessmen and planters in 1505, the country’s priorities changed radically. Everything became secondary to making money – first from cinnamon and other spices; then from coffee and tea. No one has yet attempted to put a value on the goods the colonists shipped from the island. Still, given that 90% of the world’s cinnamon came from here, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the money Sri Lanka generated for its occupiers was significant. Very big. And, the author of a recent book on crooks and thieves remarked: “all money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly.” As the rest of the country was turned into a cinnamon-producing farm, Kandy stood out as a Sinhalese citadel, offering shelter to the rest of the country for all but the 133 years it was occupied by the British. This, more than anything else, is what makes Kandy so very important across the island. In a multicultural country still working on how best to present itself, this particular legacy is enduringly essential. It is, all the same, a city that demands your full attention, if you are ever to get beneath its interminable congestion; edifices inspired by recent Soviet style planning decisions; and traffic plans that donkeys could better. As stressed pedestrians pirouette on impossibly narrow pavements, cars hoot past on wide roads, once shaded by mara trees – before health and safety got to work. If ever there is a city weeping for love and attention, for common sense and courteous urban planning, it is Kandy. It is a city that has fallen victim to the grim concerns of business, bureaucrats, traffic warlords, and the unfulfilled promises of passing politicians. Nor is it a mecca for hardened shoppers. This most addictive of modern hobbies may have replaced religion in most other countries, but here, in this most religious of cities, it takes a back seat. Niche boutiques are few, though there is no shortage of shops stocked with the essentials. An old bazaar, the Kandy Bazaar, sells everything from bananas to bags, batiks to bangles. Kandy City Centre, a ten-storey mall in the city centre built in an almost inoffensive architectural style, offers a more sophisticated range of items. Bucking the trend is Waruna’s Antique Shop, a cavernous Aladdin’s Cave of marvellous discoveries, its shelves and drawers stuffed with ancient flags, wood carvings, paintings, jewellery, and curios. And then there is the very Sri Lankan approach to specialised products. Every so often, as you travel the island, you hit upon a village dedicated to the obsessive production of just one item. There is one that only does large ceramic pots. Another is lined with cane weavers. One, more perilously, is devoted to the creation of fireworks. Down south is one for moonstones; another for masks. And in Pilimathalawa, next to Kandy, is one dedicated to brass and copper. The ribbon village of shops and workshops keeps alive an expertise that dates back to the kings of Kandy, for whom they turned out bowls, ornaments, religious objects, and body decorations. Three hundred years later, the craftsman remains, melting and moulding, designing and decorating, stamping and sealing, engraving and polishing. A surer path to satisfaction is to park your purse and your cravings for new clothes, shoes, phone accessories, or mass-manufactured ornaments, and head for Kandy...
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • The Great Dynasty: The Story Of The Kings Who Made Sri Lanka

    The Great Dynasty: The Story Of The Kings Who Made Sri Lanka
    Dec 14 2025
    Sri Lanka’s first recorded monarch founded a dynasty that would last over 600 years. Expelled from either Bengal or Gujarat (scholars argue, as scholars do) by his father, Prince Vijaya, the founding father of an eponymous royal family, arrived on the island in 543 BCE, his landing kicking off recorded Singhala history, despite the first 100 years being anything but plain sailing. Occasional bouts of regicide, lassitude, rebellion and navel gazing aside, the dynasty was as textbook perfect as it could reasonably be expected to be, and Prince Vijaya’s thirty-six successors did all that was necessary to embed, improve, and make dominant the tiny state they had first instituted in the northwest of the land. Not one to sit upon their laurels, and with a flair for marketing well ahead of their time, the Vijayans relaunched their realm barely a quarter of the way through their term, branding it as the kingdom of Anduraupura. They ruled it, according to the later Stone Book or Galpota Inscription, as human divinities, with an almost-but-not-quite-divine authority, the result of personal merit earned by their unusual, holistically philosophical approach to life and governance. Their capital city would become one of the planet’s longest continuously inhabited cities, enriched by cutting-edge industry, resources, structures, administrators, soldiers, and all the other disciplines critical to a prosperous ancient kingdom. Expanding with elastic ease, their kingdom soon grew far beyond the Rajarata, or traditional royal lands, to encompass most, if not all, of the island. To the east and south lay Ruhunurata, or Ruhana, a linked but junior principality founded around 200 BCE by Prince Mahanaga, brother to Devanampiya Tissa, the 7th or 8th monarch of the dynasty, and great-great-great-great-great nephew of Prince Vijaya himself. To the west lay the third, much smaller principality of Mayarata, another linked family fiefdom, said to have been founded in the fourth century BCE by Prince Vijaya’s nephew, Panduwasdev, the dynasty’s third monarch. Like light bulbs experiencing the almost reassuringly familiar power cuts and surges of the current Ceylon Electricity Board, a state company forever preoccupied by internal disputes, both principalities rose, fell and rose again, depending on quite how strong the Anduraupuran king was at any one time. All this was, of course, good wholesome leadership – but it was hardly groundbreaking. Seen from the perspective of the Shang, Hittites, Achaemenids, Ptolemaics, the Punts, Medians, Seleucids, Mauryas, and other numerous successful ancient dynasties, there was little to differentiate the Vijayans from the usual preoccupations with sound hegemonic hereditary rule. It was only halfway through the span of the Vijayan rule that, in welcoming to the island, Mahinda, the Buddhist son of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, they did something that changed everything. In this, their simple act of hospitality, they were to remodel their kingdom to be so profoundly different to any other, anywhere, as to endow it with an authority and energy so inimitable that, even today, it is protected and characterised by that misty encounter of 247 BCE. Not only did the Vijayans welcome the young royal missionary, but they also took him, with fervent haste, into their hearts, and with it, his evangelising philosophy of Buddhism. Like all Buddhists, Mahinda did not acknowledge a supreme god, and, despite later shorthand references to Buddhism as a religion, it is more appropriately described as a philosophy. In welcoming Mahinda, the Vijayans crossed the line from standard overlords to philosopher monarchs, governed by a formidable moral code and a preoccupation with achieving a state of transcendent bliss and well-being. If being an island was the first and foremost explanation for why Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, Buddhism is, of course, its second explanation. And a much more impressive one too, for it was a deliberate act – one that no less comprehensively than geography was to profoundly colour the country as if it had been dyed in Tyrian purple itself, that ancient and legendary dye, reserved by threat of death, for the clothes of the Roman emperors or the sails of Queen Cleopatra’s royal barge. Of course, not every king or subsequent island ruler made the moral imperatives of Buddhism their magnetic north. However, most tried to, and all were ultimately judged against its teachings as they are still today by ordinary citizens in towns and villages across the land. For however ordinary Sri Lankans are, they are also unexpectedly religiously minded. Religion today, to the astonishment of many observers, is holding its own. Right across the world, experts and pollsters have had to rethink their view of what would befall religion as countries modernised. Atheists, agnostics and all who are religiously unaffiliated account for a ...
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    2 hrs and 4 mins
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Most relevant
There are very few audiobooks or podcasts covering Sri Lanka and it's history. David, who produces and narrates these, was born in Sri Lanka and bought an abandoned colonial house near Kandy. He has turned it into a FANTASTIC hotel (with only 7 rooms.)
the audible 'books' or podcasts cover a bit more of the background to this hotel and his story than the podcast only series.
You should listen to both AND THEN COME AND STAY HERE!!!

fantastic hotel deep in the forests of Sri Lanka

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