Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is parted from the south-eastern tip of India by the shallow Palk Strait. Its heart is a block of mountains where tea estates climb towards Horton Plains and Adam’s Peak, whose summit footprint is revered by Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians. The Mahaweli flows from those hills to the deep natural harbour of Trincomalee. Two monsoons share out the rain, and the drier north and east have long relied on ancient reservoirs.

Buddhism arrived in the third century BC with Mahinda, son of the emperor Ashoka, and a tree grown from a cutting of the Buddha’s bodhi tree stands at Anuradhapura. In the fifth century Kashyapa set a palace on the rock of Sigiriya. The Portuguese reached the coast in 1505, and Britain took the whole island when the kingdom of Kandy fell in 1815. Ceylon gained independence in February 1948 and became Sri Lanka in 1972. A civil war lasted from 1983 to 2009.

In the Esala Perahera at Kandy, dozens of costumed elephants parade by torchlight, one bearing a replica of the casket that holds the Buddha’s tooth. The April new year is kept by Sinhalese and Tamils alike. Meals are rice and curry, or hoppers, bowl-shaped rice-flour pancakes, and the national cricket side won the World Cup in 1996. Exports run from garments and Ceylon tea, grown in the hills around Nuwara Eliya, to rubber and true cinnamon, and sapphires are dug at Ratnapura.