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Updated: June 19, 2025
The reason for selecting this plain in the heart of the country as a suitable location for its capital is not obvious, except that from the earliest ages the spot has been sacred to the votaries of Buddha. Its site is near the centre of the great plain which occupies the northern portion of the island, about one hundred miles from Kandy, and three hundred feet above the level of the sea.
It seems wonderful that so much which is strange, beautiful, and interesting should be so easy of access from England, and yet that so few English travellers know comparatively anything of Ceylon, except Galle and Colombo, and perhaps Kandy and Trincomalee. Saturday, April 7th.
Where Sugar comes from in Ceylon. Ceylon is the classic ground of Buddhism and Kandy is its Mecca, whither trend the devout followers of the prophet in myriads yearly. Rock-cut temples and other shrines are scattered over the hilly portions of the island, some of which are large, some small, but each one having a stone image of Buddha wrought after the conventional pattern.
Anuradhapura was the first capital, but owing to many vicissitudes and several invasions of the Malabars of Southern India, the capital was moved many times, Kandy being the sixth; it preceded Cotta, near Colombo, the latter being the present capital.
He books his place for Kandy; he knows that is in the very centre of Ceylon there surely must be sport there, he thinks. The morning gun fires from the Colombo fort at 5 A.M. and the coach starts.
"She died, no doubt," said Sancho. "Of course," said Trifaldin; "they don't bury living people in Kandy, only the dead."
The view of a thrifty plantation at sunrise, when each spray is dripping with refreshing dew and every little branch is diamond-capped, is lovely beyond expression. A surprise awaited us on one occasion while visiting a coffee plantation near Kandy.
A peculiar race of wild people, called Veddahs, inhabit the forest fastness of Bintenne, a district situated southeast from Kandy forty or fifty miles, and a hundred and twenty or thereabouts from Colombo, in a northeast direction.
Thousands of acres of forest and dense jungle were cleared and burned over in the neighborhood of Kandy alone, at great expense and labor, to prepare the ground for coffee planting.
In some parts of Ceylon, the leech pest is so prevalent as to render whole districts quite uninhabitable by human beings. At Kandy as well as in the vicinity of Point de Galle, frequent attempts have been made to establish sugar plantations, but the soil or the climate, or both, proved to be unfavorable to the growth of the cane.
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