Anuradhapura
128 miles (205km) from Colombo is Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka’s first capital founded about the 4th century BC. According to the Mahavansa, the Sinhala Buddhist chronicle, the city was a model of planning. Precincts were set aside for huntsmen and scavengers and even heretics and foreigners. There were hostels and hospitals, separate cemeteries for high and low castes. A water supply was assured by the construction of reservoirs.More than a hundred years before Tsin-Shee Hwang-Tee had set his millions of laborers at work on the great wall of China, ancient Anuradhapura was a flourishing city and the capital of Lanka, as the island was called by the ancients. It was a youthful contemporary of Babylon and Nineveh, greater than either in territorial area, and was in its glory and amplitude when Rome and Carthage were young.
Anuradhapura was to continue for over a thousand years as the national capital. During that time there were 123 kings. Archeological excavations in Anuradhapura confirm that people lived in the area as early as 500 B.C. According to the Mahavamsa, the Sinhala Buddhist chronicle, there were three "Anuradhas" for whom the city was named. The first and most likely, was a general of prince Vijaya, the north Indian rebel, who was considered to be the forefather of the Sinhala race. Anuradhapura remained the capital of Sri Lanka until the 10th century A.D. The city of Anuradhapura, in its heyday, was the greatest city of all. It covered some 20 square miles, and its population was estimated to be in the tens of thousands. The king lived in a palace with 1,000 rooms, in the center of the city. According to the Mahavansa the city was a model of planning. Precincts were set aside for huntsmen and scavengers and even heretics and foreigners. There were hostels and hospitals, separate cemeteries for high and low castes. A water supply was assured by the construction of reservoirs.
But internecine struggles for the royal succession grew, and it became more and more vulnerable to the pressures of South Indian political expansion. The city was finally abandoned and the capital withdrawn to more secluded areas.But the monuments of Anuradhapura’s heyday survive, surrounded by the solemn umbrage of trees, scions of ancient parkland.
Abhayagiri Dagoba, shown here, was founded as a monastery, about 88 B.C., by Sinhalese King Vattagamini. A hundred and fifty years before Vespasian had begun the great amphitheatre at Rome, Walagambahu, this Lankan king, had completed the Abhayagiria Dagoba, a monumental structure fifty feet higher than St. Paul's Cathedral, and containing an amount of solid masonry sufficient to build eight thousand houses large enough to accommodate forty thousand people.
