The Kingdom That Walked On Water: The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 10

The History of Sri Lanka

The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka 10

The Kingdom That Walked On Water

“No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.” Alice in Wonderland

The Lost Laboratory

Far into the north of Sri Lanka, forty kilometres from Anuradhapura to the south, and fifty more to the western seaboard, lie the ruins of a shrivelled reservoir - Kuda Vilach Chiya.

The tank is close to some of the country’s most iconic and mythical sites, including the landing place of Prince Vijay, paterfamilias of the nation, the palace of his forsaken native queen; and the country’s first recorded Singhala kingdom.

Kuda Vilach Chiya sits on the eastern edge of what is now Wilpattu National Park. Reaching the spot is no easy matter since it lies within a deep entangled jungle for which special permission must be granted to gain access. Even after that, it requires a tractor to take you any closer to the site, and then a lengthy journey on foot. For countless centuries this has been leopard country.

Wilpattu’s vast 130,000-hectare wilderness is one of the island’s best kept wildlife secrets, so well off the tourist trail as to exponentially nurture its hundreds of rare species of fauna and flora - along with many endemic species: the Toque and Purple-faced Leaf Monkeys, Golden Palm Cat, Mouse Deer, Dwarf Toads, Hour-Glass Tree and Wood Frogs, Ceylon Jungle Fowl and Ceylon Grey Hornbill. Even the ultra-rare Sloth bear can be seen here, attracted by the sweet golden fruit of the Palu Tree.

But despite all these exceptional features, it is for its water that Wilpattu matters most. Its name is more literally translated as the “land of Villu,” “villu” being lakes. The whole area is pockmarked with shallow rainwater lakes. But the lakes are eclipsed by Kuda Vilach Chiya, a much more deliberate water feature, and one that is hard to make much sense of at first. Today it amounts to little more than a long two-to-three-kilometre embankment overgrown by trees and grasses and breached in many places by migratory elephants. It is all that remains of the extraordinary man-made lake that was constructed here sometime after 67 BCE by the first Lambakanna king, Vasabha.

Hardier survivors from that time are two masterpieces of ancient aqua engineering, the creation of which allowed Sri Lanka’s builders to construct astonishingly vast water reservoirs. These in turn would propel the 500-year-old kingdom into the political stratosphere. The constructions – Bisokotuwas – allowed water to exit a reservoir without putting so much pressure on the dam embankment that it would collapse. As a result, the size of the reservoir was able to scale up to unprecedented levels; and water of unimaginably enormous quantities could be collected to extend agriculture, support ever larger and more urban populations and produce crops whose surplus would rapidly and exponentially enrich the young state.

The Bisokotuwas at Kuda Vilach Chiya are precision made structures, the stone slabs used on the inner face fitting so perfectly together that there is no room for even the modest weed to grow. Rising above it, the sluice tower itself can still be seen, part of the same remarkable lost laboratory of water. The same Lambakanna king, Vasabha, is also credited with the construction of the Mahavilach Chiya Wewa, a tank barely five kilometres away from Kuda Vilach Chiya, with a storage capacity of two thousands four hundred acres that even now is a key part of the modern Sri Lanka’s water infrastructure. Quite why two such large tanks were built so close to one another is a mystery. But their very existence, and that of the Bisokotuwas that made them possible, is the point that most matters.

Crying Out for Water

The area around Kuda Vilach Chiya, though remote even by Sri Lankan standards, bears the impact of multiple moments of serious history.

Not for nothing was it chosen for its capacious reservoirs. It was once a place of some importance. Ten thousand years earlier and thirty kilometres north are hypnotic cave paintings of the Neolithic age in Tantirimale. Two hundred or so years earlier the local temple, Thanthirimale Rajamaha Viharaya, marks the spot where the sacred Bo tree rested as it travelled to Anuradhapura from India under the protection of the Indian Emperor Ashoka’s daughter, Sangamitta.

Some historians even believe that the site was once home to the lost kingdom of Panduvasdewu Nuwara, the early Vijayan realm that most immediately predated Anuradhapura itself. A monastery lies on the same site, its excavated gardens littered with stone containers created to contain gems, and the statues of gods and lions ruined when the country’s last unitary kingdom fell to invaders in 1215 CE. And in the nearby jungle ancient monastic caves crouch, decorated with a script that predated Buddhism itself – Brahmi.

All around it stretch the flat and softly undulating lands of the country’s massive Dry Zone. Much of Sri Lanka is very dry - as if the land itself had been bleed white and hung out to dry. It is not perennially wet like Bangladesh. This is especially true of the Rajarata, the land most immediately around the Anuradhapura - stretching from Jaffna and Trincomalee to Puttalam and Kandy - that lay, like Kuda Vilachchiya itself, solidly within the control of the king.

To achieve anything more than a rudimentary agricultural existence required the availability of year-long water, and plenty of it. Water, after all, permitted greater areas to be used for growing crops, and higher yield densities. It meant food surplus, profit, trade - and with it the capacity to develop an urban and industrial capability, underwritten by technical advances from construction and weaponry to horticulture, and transport. It meant that the state could better develop those organizational and professional skills essential for its success – commerce, industry, engineering, labour, planning, law, medicine, food storage, finance.

Water management and irrigation, water storage and collection, water distribution – all this was what made the Anuradhapuran Kingdom possible in the first place. A defendable island state it may have been, and a centralised Buddhist one at that; but without water it could go nowhere, do nothing, be nothing.

This focus on water technology was not a new preoccupation brought into being by the first Lambakarnas in the 67 BCE; but they, more than any other dynasty, ensured the rapid development of the resources and technologies that provided their domain with year-long water.

The Gathering Wave

The scattered Vedda and other pre-Sinhalese populations of the island had mastered the construction of small tanks before the fifth century BCE, and, with it, limited forms of agricultural production.

This was the start of what is now known as the Tank Cascade system. Rainwater was collected in shallow ponds and crude distribution methods used to dispense it. This quickly developed into the construction of low embankments across valleys to dam small rivers or rivulets that would deposit their water into a series of downstream tanks, and, ultimately, paddy fields. Large seasonal rivers were next targeted with dams and distribution channels.

Soon enough a profoundly detailed understanding of ho...