POLNNARUWA

Early in the l lth century occupying Cholas stood at the small village of Pulattinagara. Much further south out siders stared across the river Mahaweli. The Cholas said  “Backs to the friendly North, front to the hostile South,” and at Pulattinagara they built Polonnaruwa.

Before the century ended Vijaya Bahu I had flung the Cholas out. But he did not choose to return to old Anuradhapura a mistake, surely. He stayed put at Polonnaruwa. And so did Parakrama, called “The Great.” He too had no desire to go back to the old capital. From Polonnaruwa he constructed his far-flung irrigation works, his palaces and pleasure gardens and set in the precincts of the Uttarara ma, in the famous Gal Vihare, those granite Buddhas gems of the world’s sculpture.

As the 12th century wared, Nissanka Malla erected in the quadrangle his whimsical lotus stems. Early in the 13th century Magha of Kalinga sacked Polonnaruwa. An island kingdom fell that had stood continuously for over a millennium and a halt, from the 6th and 5th centuries BC and the misty times of vijaya and Pandukabhaya. For the rest, in that same 13th century.