Sri Lanka
A teardrop island of tea, temples, and tropical biodiversity
Sri Lanka is a teardrop-shaped island off the southern tip of India, a tropical land of extraordinary natural and cultural richness once known as Ceylon. Famous for its tea, cinnamon, and gem mines, it has been a crossroads of Indian Ocean trade for millennia, drawing Arab, Chinese, and European merchants to its shores. Lush rainforests, palm-fringed beaches, ancient Buddhist cities, and misty highland plantations crowd a relatively small island. Long divided by ethnic conflict and battered by tsunami and economic crisis, it remains a place of resilience and remarkable beauty.
A central massif of forested highlands, rising to Pidurutalagala at 2,524 meters, dominates the interior and feeds the rivers that radiate out to coastal plains. The hill country, cool and wet, is the heart of the celebrated tea industry, while the lowlands shift from rainforest in the wet southwest to drier savanna in the north and east. The island lies in the path of two monsoons that water different regions in turn. Its isolation has produced exceptional biodiversity, including endemic species and one of the highest concentrations of leopards and elephants, and the coasts were devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Home to one of Asia's oldest continuous Buddhist civilizations, with ancient capitals at Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, the island was successively touched by Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonizers, the last of whom unified it and built its plantation economy. Independence came in 1948, but tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority erupted into a brutal civil war that lasted from 1983 until 2009. More recently a severe economic and debt crisis in 2022 brought mass protests and the collapse of a government. Tea, tourism, textiles, and remittances sustain the economy, and a deep Buddhist heritage and multiethnic culture define the nation.