The Kings of Kandy
George Woodcock describes how, in opposition to Portuguese, Dutch and British intruders, the highland kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon flourished under a succession of Buddhist rulers almost until the year of Waterloo.
The kingdom of Kandy, which came to an end in the year of Waterloo, was a realm built on defiance. The European invasion of Ceylon raised it out of obscurity and made it the mountain stronghold of Sinhalese traditions; for most of the two and a half centuries of its life as the last Ceylonese kingdom, its independence was landlocked and precarious. “For which way soever you enter into it,” said the English sailor Robert Knox, who lived there as the prisoner of King Raja Sinha from 1660 to 1679, “you must ascend vast and high mountains, and descend little or nothing. The wayes are many, but very narrow, so that but one can go abreast. The Hills are covered with Wood and great Rocks, so that ’tis scarce possible to get up any where, but onely in the paths, in all which there are gates made of Thorns.” In the narrow defiles, within the gates of thorn, successive armies of Portuguese and Dutch and English were ambushed and defeated by the peasant levies of a kingdom that seemed to thrive on the need to resist.
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