From Colombo to Kandy: Researching Colonial Ceylon

Clare Flynn
Jun 7
5 min read

The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, Kandy

To mark the publication of The Star of Ceylon, readers may be interested to hear some of the ways I researched 1906 colonial Ceylon – now Sri Lanka.

The first and most obvious thing I did was to travel there. It was my second visit, building on vivid memories from an earlier visit in the 1990s. I decided to focus on Colombo, the tea growing Central Highlands and then the southwest coast. At the time of my visit, I planned to base the story on a tea plantation and hence didn’t revisit Kandy. Had I known it would end up being the focal point of the book I’d have done things differently.

The trip was extremely useful anyway. In Colombo, I stayed in the Galle Face Hotel which appears in the book, wandered around Colombo seeking relics of the colonial past such as Cargill’s Stores (where Norton buys some clothes).

I went to Nuwara Eliya in the Central Highlands which also features in the book, and where I spent time talking with a retired tea planter and visiting the golf club and the hotel where a pivotal scene takes place. These places were almost exactly as they were back at the time of my novel. A veritable time capsule. I stayed in a fabulous former planter’s bungalow in the middle of a plantation with lush gardens, uniformed servants and spectacular views – source of much inspiration for the government agent’s residence in Kandy.

Back in Britain, I revisited some of my original thinking – influenced by my reading of Growing by Leonard Woolf, which tells of his seven years as a young civil servant in Ceylon. This was a journey from an unquestioning acceptance of empire to a growing disillusionment on his part, leading to him resigning during his first long leave back in London, when he fell in love with Virginia. I got so much valuable inspiration from that fascinating book. Woolf was assigned to the terrible stinking pearl fishery and vividly described the pearl auctions there – leading me to dive deeper into research of the pearl fishing process and include it in my book when Stella’s party visits it. Woolf served in Kandy (his least enjoyable period) and regularly played tennis there and lived in a house by the lake – as does my Norton Baxter. I shamelessly stole Woolf’s combination of love of the job itself with doubts about colonialism. His happiest time was when essentially doing his own thing down south in Hambantota as acting Government Agent (the youngest ever). I didn’t send Norton to work there but I drew on Woolf’s references to the hunting in that region and sent most of my characters there on a disastrous hunting trip. That included my own visit to the salt pans and the national park back in the 90s – fortunately I still had a great photo album of my travels there and all over Sri Lanka.

Another book that offered inspiration was rather dreadful – Sir Richard Burton’s blustering old buffer’s account of his years game hunting in Ceylon and helping found the town of Nuwara Eliya, back in the 1850s. In The Star of Ceylon I give the book to Stella’s brother Ronald to read – resulting in his insistence on Stella, their father and the horrible Gordon Blackstock making a diversion to the pearl fishery and to visit the Doric Bungalow, built in 1802-04 for the then governor, Lord North – by the mid 19th century already a ruin. I backed up Burton’s descriptions of the place with the etching below - done back in the early nineteenth century by James Cordiner and a YouTube video (in Sinhala so I couldn’t understand a word!) of someone visiting it recently – it’s very off the beaten track and there’s not much more than a pile of rubble left to see. Stella’s visit occurred half a century after Burton’s and the YouTuber was more than a century after that – so in the absence of any other images (I hunted high and low) I used my imagination in deciding the level of ruination likely in 1906.

You Tube came to my rescue once more – taking me on a tour of Bogambara Prison (again I couldn’t understand a word of the commentary!), around the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic (I had been, but too long ago to remember the exact geography) and on a rail journey between Colombo and Kandy. Old black and white photographs from the Edwardian period gave me an idea of street scenes and architecture including the interior of the kachcheri (the government offices), the Club and the Queen Victoria Hotel.

Other useful resources were the old colonial annual “blue books” containing statistics about everything to do with the country and its governance, and a one-off compendium I chanced upon – a kind of cross between a Lonely Planet Guide and Who’s Who. Coincidentally to my great joy this doorstopper of a book was published in 1906 and gave descriptions of every aspect of life there at the time as well as photographs and names of all the key players.

My top tips for researching a historical location

Visit the location if possible, to capture a sense of the sounds, smells, ambience away from the tourist spots. Look for little details that will add colour and help bring your descriptions to life. Obviously there will have been massive changes since the time you’re writing about – although I found many places in Sri Lanka that were almost exactly as they were in colonial days.
If you can’t visit in person then read as widely and deeply as possible (well do that anyway of course!) and consult maps – especially historical ones. Diaries and memoirs are invaluable material.
Search Youtube for anything appropriate – old movies and newsreels, rail journeys (it’s amazing how many young travellers hang out of train windows for hours with their camera-phones recording!). Timing journeys is also important – as well as remembering that roads were often just tracks and there were only a couple of dozen motor cars in Ceylon at the time of my book.
Use Google Earth to understand the topography.
Clothes are important. Contemporary photos and sketches as well as visits to museums will help here – but remember if your book is in the tropics to pay attention to how dress would be modified – lighter fabrics such as linens and muslins – even though they must still have been terribly stifling compared to the little we can get away with today! Looking at old photos it is astonishing how many men continued to wear heavy suits with standup collars and ties and felt hats even in the blistering heat. Standards, dear boy, standards!