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Updated: June 25, 2025
One more flight of stairs leads up to the gallery, surrounding the Mahaseya dagoba. The view from this highest gallery is magnificent; the great plain gave a wide vista, while beyond was an outline of the distant mountain range; nearer we saw great masses of green, through which shone the three great dagobas of Anuradhapura.
It would almost seem as though the Singhalese of the present day could not belong to the same race as the people who built Anuradhapura before Christ was born. Many of the prominent Christian sects have churches and missionary establishments in the island. It has long been a popular missionary field with several denominations, more particularly in the northern part.
Though the inhabitants of Anuradhapura were not themselves a maritime people, they were constantly visited by others from afar, who brought with them rich goods to exchange for pearls and precious stones. We know that Ceylon was rich in these at that period, even as she is at the present time, and exported peacocks, apes, and ivory.
"The magnificent city of Anuradhapura is refulgent from the numerous temples and palaces whose golden pinnacles glitter in the sky. The sides of its streets are strewed with black sand; they are spanned with arches bearing flags of gold and silver; on either side are vessels of the same precious metals, containing flowers; and in niches are statues holding lamps of great value.
Sufficient is recorded of the personal character of Wijaya, the early conqueror of the island, to prove his utter barbarity, so that we are naturally led still more to wonder whence came the artists for artists they were who designed and built such cities as Anuradhapura and Pollonarua, the first of which was probably founded during his reign.
That makes it between two thousand and three thousand years old, which we should think ancient enough if we hadn't visited Egypt first. Anuradhapura flourished for centuries as the capital of the Cingalese kings, who often carried on savage battles with the Tamils when they came over from India also.
All oriental narrative is tinctured with exaggeration, but Sir James Emerson Tennent, so long officially connected with the island, and personally familiar with the ruins of Anuradhapura, says no one who visits the place to-day can doubt that Ceylon, in the zenith of its prosperity, contained ten times its present population; and as he wrote this in 1859, when the aggregate was about one million, he wished to signify that the number of inhabitants, at the period to which he referred, was probably ten millions.
The wonder is how the priests found room to walk about between those multitudinous columns which so filled the space in their halls. One more sight in this city of ancient glory. Do you see across that park-like space of short grass some fires glimmering weirdly in the dusk which has now fallen round the most sacred object in Anuradhapura; I won't say what it is. Come nearer.
Japanese houses are only constructed, as a rule, of bamboo frames with tissue coverings, but the ruined cities of Ceylon were built of stone and brick, presumedly indestructible except by some great and general catastrophe. The ruins of Anuradhapura show that in mediæval times it must have been a city containing a vast concourse of people.
This passion for covering their persons with gewgaws is as old with these people as the ancient city of Anuradhapura, where the same custom prevailed among the Singhalese two thousand years ago. The abundance and beauty of the precious stones found in the soil of the island naturally led to their being mounted and worn by the wealthiest people.
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