As a youth, I spent six months living and working in Colombo,
the capital of Sri Lanka. No doubt it was a function of my age,
but I still believe that there is no country in the world which
has such evocative place names: Ambalangoda, Anuradhapura,
Trincomalee, Jaffna, Nuwara Eliya (‘City of light’ in
Sinhalese), Batticaloa (‘Land of the singing fish’). The variety
and musicality of these place names stems from the island’s
history: most of the great sea-faring nations (read: rapacious
colonisers) have traded with or invaded Sri Lanka, from the
Dutch to the Arabs to, of course, the Portuguese and the
British. Many place names are thus heirlooms of previous
regimes, which have passed through many different languages,
before being ‘reclaimed’ by Sinhalese. Milagiriya, for example,
was once the Portuguese for ‘Our Lady of the Miracles’ (milagro
in Portuguese). The name of the capital city, Colombo, is
particularly representative of this tendency. Its original name
was Kao-lan-pu, a Chinese appellation the meanin