The Sea Road to the East, Gibraltar to Wei-hai-wei / Six Lectures Prepared for the Visual Instruction Committee of the Colonial Office

by A. J. Sargent

But the most remarkable relic of the past is not of brick or stone; it is a tree, the Bo tree, sacred beyond all others, since tradition asserts that it sprang from a branch of the very tree under which, at Gaya in the Ganges Valley, Gautama attained his Buddhahood. If this be really the tree planted in the year 288 B.C., it is one of the oldest in the world with a recorded history. 43 At the entrance to the sacred enclosure we pass the stalls of the sellers of lotos blossoms which the pilgrims buy 44 to offer at the shrine. Inside is the tree with its raised terrace and altars piled with flowers, its priests and 45 groups of worshippers at prayer. It is a very different scene from the Hindu temple or Mohammedan mosque.

In many of the old buildings of the Sinhalese kingdom there are elaborate carvings and paintings; here we 46 have a fine specimen of an interior. Both the buildings and their ornaments prove that the people were well advanced in some of the arts of civilization. But the native arts and crafts are almost dead, killed by foreign trade and cheap goods. We may still see at 47 Kandy the weaving of the native or Dumbara cloths, and the working in silver and brass; but these are 48 barely kept alive by people interested in the past. The Sinhalese generally have no industries apart from agriculture, and even in this they keep to the old and primitive methods and crops, leaving to Europeans, aided by imported Tamil coolies, the real agricultural development of the country. The next generation may see a change, as the Sinhalese of to-day are learning to appreciate the value of education. There are over a quarter of a million children attending the schools provided or supported by the Government, and a beginning has also been made with technical training. Here we 49 have a village school, with the classes being held in the open air, as the building is too small for the crowd of 50 scholars. But it takes many years of education to change the ideas and habits of a conservative people, and it will be long before the familiar figure of the professional 51 letter-writer disappears from the steps of the post office.

We must look for modern progress not in the ruined cities but in the new plantation districts of the hill country. The railway will again carry us in comfort through the slopes of the planting country to Niuwara Eliya, up in the clouds, six thousand feet above the sea, the health resort of the planters and European residents.

The prosperity of Ceylon to-day is largely due to the British planter. The plantation industry started not with tea but with coffee. Though it was grown by the Dutch in the lowlands, coffee was of small importance until its introduction into the hill country, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As the interior was opened up the crop increased rapidly, so that, by 1870, Ceylon was exporting over a million hundredweight, as compared with thirty thousand in 1837. Prices were high, the railway to Kandy had recently been opened, new estates were being planted, and every one thought that the future of coffee-growing was assured. But at the very moment of greatest prosperity came the first sign of the ruin of the industry. A minute fungus appeared on the plants in some districts and began to spread steadily. At first little notice was taken of the disease; but it gradually extended to one estate after another and no remedy could be found; while Brazil, which was free from the pest, poured supplies of coffee into the markets of the world and sent down prices to their old level. A series of very wet seasons completed the work begun by the fungus.

The planters did not despair. They experimented with new products, such as cinchona, until they again produced too much for the market; but it was tea which in the end saved Ceylon. The tea-plant was hardier than coffee and was found to be well suited to the climate of the hill country, with its alternations of rain and sunshine. As soon as the planters were convinced of its value, large areas were planted with tea, so that between 1876 and 1886 the crop rose from eight to eighty million pounds in weight. By the end of the century it had doubled again and entirely displaced coffee as the staple crop of the island. The whole industry has developed independently of the native Sinhalese, by means of foreign capital, foreign direction and foreign labour; even the very food for the coolies must be brought in by sea, since the Sinhalese agriculturalists produce little more than they need for themselves. But the planters are not repeating their former mistake; they are experimenting with other crops besides tea, as cacao and rubber; the latter especially seems to have a good prospect in the future. The Government also is assisting in the work. In the beautiful gardens at 52 Peradeniya, near Kandy, we may see a bewildering variety of plants. Here is the native bamboo and the 53 curious talipot palm, which blooms only once after many years and then dies; here is a specimen in bloom. The 54 leaves of this palm have a special interest, since they are used like parchment for writing on; so that the native book takes the curious form which we see in this 55 picture. Here, too, are all kinds of foreign plants being grown to test their fitness for cultivation in the island. It was in the low-country gardens, connected with Peradeniya, that the Para rubber tree was first introduced from Brazil and many experiments made to discover the best methods of growth and tapping.

RAINFALL. JUNE-OCTOBER.

The tea plant and rubber tree need plenty of warmth and moisture for their growth, and these conditions are 56 only to be found in part of Ceylon. In Colombo it is hot and wet for the greater part of the year, but in the early spring, though still hot, it is dry. Over all the lowlands there is no winter and summer in our sense of the terms, but only alternations of wet and dry. In the hills it is cooler than on the plains, though there is even more rain; but mainly owing to the structure of Ceylon the wet and dry seasons occur at different times of the year in different districts. The district near Colombo has most of its rain when the Southwest Monsoon blows from the sea in the summer; in the north and east of the island the winter is the wet season, when the northeast wind comes down from the Bay of Bengal. Here the rainy period is shorter than in the southwest, so that the total fall in the year is less, and the whole country is drier. The highland ridges, running from northwest to southeast, at right angles to the course of the winds, form a rough barrier and division between the two kinds of climate. At Niuwara Eliya we are not far from the dividing line. We may drive across a ridge or pass through a tunnel, leaving clouds and heavy rain behind us, and come out into clear skies and bright sunshine. 57 The whole face of the country changes; in place of forest, plantation and waterfalls, such as we see here, we 58 find open moor and grassland, or patana, with cattle grazing as on our own moors. The contrast of seasons 59 is so strong that the flowering periods of many plants on opposite sides of the mountains are six months apart, as they depend on variations of moisture rather than of temperature.

We have been travelling through many miles of cultivated land on a comfortable railway; yet in this same district, in the early nineteenth century, our soldiers on the march to Kandy had to hew a path through the jungle and sling the heavy guns from tree to tree. The railway now extends from one end of the island to the other; off the main routes we find good roads on which 60 coaches run; here is one of them carrying the mails, though its appearance does not suggest very rapid or comfortable travelling. Along many of the chief routes motor-cars now run. Improved means of communication have opened up the interior to the planters and enabled them to reach foreign markets with their products, and have given us that effective control of the whole island which was never attained by the Portuguese or Dutch. The history and progress of Ceylon under British rule is bound up with the making of roads and the building of bridges. With the coming of the road and the railway the elephant has declined in importance, though he is one of the most valuable products of the jungle and one of the oldest articles of export. Elephants still exist in large numbers in the island, but they are for the most part kept by the native chiefs for ornamental and ceremonial purposes, especially in connexion with religious processions. Here 61 is a picture of the last great drive; in the background are the wild elephants just driven into the enclosure, while those in the foreground are tame and trained to assist in reducing the new captures to order.

The wealth and progress of Ceylon depend upon its crops, and the crops can neither be grown nor marketed without means of transport; but the first condition of growth in a tropical region is the supply of water. We have seen how the early kings built great tanks or reservoirs for irrigation in the drier districts of the north, so that the land could support a large population. After the Tamil invasions these great works fell into decay and became choked with jungle; native villages were even built inside the old embankments. The Government is now reviving the policy of the past rulers, and as more and more of the irrigation works are restored the waste land of the north will be reclaimed and the face of the country will change. At present, though Ceylon is purely agricultural, with no manufacturing industries and only a little mining for gems and plumbago, yet the food for the towns and for the coolies on the plantations is brought over the sea. This is an unnatural state of affairs; with proper use of its great resources the island should be able to feed itself.