Features

The Cinnamon Captain’s Circuit

Published

3 days ago

2026/09/27

Thilina Walpola

Three Maps of Ceylon Cinnamon

From the Pathfinder Collection

By Jennifer Moragoda
jennifermoragoda787@gmail.com

A remarkable Dutch map of Ceylon made in 1719 allows us to follow cinnamon through the country almost village by village.

Part of a series of thirty-six maps showing territories of the Dutch East India Company, it was drawn by Joannes van Campen and shows mainly the south-western portion of the island then under Company control. The twelve korales or provinces are distinguished by colour and extend, in the map’s description, from the river Caymelle to the Valave. Brohier notes that Caymelle was the Dutch name for the Maha Oya. A brown line marks the boundary of the Kandyan king’s territory. Within this political geography, a red line encloses what might otherwise be described simply as ‘Canelle Landen’: “the expanse of the luxuriant cinnamon bushes from the Chilaw river to the hook of Dondra.”

What makes the map extraordinary, however, is its detail. It marks the old administrative divisions through which the cinnamon country extended; villages and places associated with the seasonal work of the peelers; the forty-six numbered points along the annual route of the Cinnamon Captain; and the five coastal places to which the peeled bark was delivered.

Two further Dutch maps narrow the lens. A plan of Salpiti Korale maps cinnamon gardens and grounds among localities that are now part of greater Colombo and its suburbs. At an even more microscopic level, three drawings of a single chena near Hanwella represent individual trees by letters and colour and enumerate them.

Together they preserve an unusually detailed geography of Ceylon cinnamon and the enterprise built around it under the Dutch.

Van Campen’s map in facsimile M. F. N. Rotteveel’s 1901 facsimile of Van Campen’s 1719 map.

Much of that detail can be recovered today through the meticulous work of R. L. Brohier and J. H. O. Paulusz. Their descriptions and translations of Dutch maps and records provide the context that makes otherwise cryptic routes, symbols and localities intelligible.

A Circuit Through Cinnamon Country

Van Campen’s map immediately provides an overview of the country from which cinnamon was obtained. It is divided according to the old Sinhalese territorial and administrative divisions of korales and pattus. Many of their names, and the places associated with them, remain recognizable today, although their old boundaries are now less familiar. The map may surprise modern readers who are unaware that its cinnamon country extended as far north as the Chilaw River and south to Dondra.

The map also makes clear that the geography of cinnamon did not coincide neatly with political boundaries. It marks the limits of Dutch territory and the adjoining lands of the Kandyan king, while cinnamon also grew beyond Dutch-controlled territory. Access to cinnamon in Kandyan territory could therefore depend upon relations with the Kandyan court.

The most striking feature of the map is the minute detail with which this cinnamon geography is recorded. Forty-six numbered points trace the ordinary land route followed by the Cinnamon Captain, head of the Mahabadda or Cinnamon Department, on his annual general visitation at the commencement of the harvest. Starting from Colombo, his circuit took him north and then through a succession of korales to the south before he returned along the coast to Colombo.

The route recorded in Brohier and Paulusz runs through Negombo, Pittigal Korale, Hapitigam Korale, Sinna Korale, Rayigam Korale, Pasdun Korale, Wallalawiti Korale, Galle Korale, Beligama Korale, Morawa Korale and Dolosdas Korale, the latter embracing the Gangaboda and Welaboda Pattus of Matara and the eastern and western Giruwa Pattus of Hambantota.

On the map, the numbered stations allow that journey to be followed across the country. Even where individual names become difficult to decipher on a reduced reproduction, the extent of the circuit can be grasped.

But another set of small red circles gives the map an even more unusual human geography. In the words of its description, these indicate the villages and places “in which and near which” the cinnamon peelers commonly pitched their tents during the peeling season “in order to gather that costly bark.” These temporary encampments belonged to the older system of harvesting in which parties of peelers travelled through the cinnamon country, cutting suitable stems and bringing them back in bundles to be peeled and fashioned into quills.

The red circles are scattered through the cinnamon country densely enough that the map gives a visual impression of the scale of the seasonal harvest before one has deciphered every locality. J. H. O. Paulusz considered the map “of unusual value, indeed indispensable for studying the history of the Salagama community because it illustrates their manner of life, the districts in which they lived, and the hardships and dangers they endured.”

The Captain’s numbered route and the peelers’ encampments therefore record two related geographies. One is the official circuit of inspection. The other is the far more dispersed geography of the people actually gathering and preparing the cinnamon.

The map completes the picture by identifying five coastal delivery points—Negombo, Colombo, Beruwala, Galle and Matara—to which the peeled bark was “carried on their shoulders and transported with great labour.” Taken together, these details allow the old cinnamon enterprise to be visualized almost in motion: the Captain moving between his 46 stations; peelers establishing seasonal camps in and near particular villages; cinnamon being gathered and prepared in the surrounding country; and the finished bark moving towards five points on the coast.

The map also bears the letters A–H on a smaller circuit associated with Maradana, “where the best of that fragrant bark is peeled.” Brohier’s explanatory note identifies the area within this orbit as including Maradana, Wellicadde, Kirilepona and Bamblepitie—names recognizable today as Maradana, Welikada, Kirulapone and Bambalapitiya. These are now parts of a densely built city; on Van Campen’s map they belonged to the geography of cinnamon.

That juxtaposition is one of the pleasures of reading the old maps. Familiar names survive, but the landscapes attached to them have changed almost beyond recognition.

Salpiti Korale, Plot by Plot

A second map sharpens the focus further.

Where Van Campen’s map provides an overview of the geographical reach and movement of the cinnamon enterprise, the detailed plan of Salpiti Korale attaches cinnamon more closely to individual grounds and localities in and around what is now greater Colombo. Similar detailed plans were drawn for other korales and areas in which cinnamon grew.

The plate itself carries a striking collection of names familiar to a modern resident: Kotte, Mirihana, Welikada, Nawala, Pepiliyana, Kollupitiya, Wellawatte and Galkissa, or Mount Lavinia, among others. They appear beside or among numbered and outlined cinnamon grounds. The importance of the map is not that all of modern Colombo lay within Salpiti Korale—it did not—but that it allows particular 18th-century cinnamon localities around the expanding city and its eastern and southern approaches to be set against places we know today.

A related survey shows how closely Dutch mapping followed Colombo’s expansion. Brohier notes that, as settlement spread beyond the Fort and Pettah, a map made about 1766 by Lieutenant C. D. Wentzel surveyed the Colombo district for a radius of five miles in all directions from the Fort. Particular care was taken to mark the cinnamon-growing districts, partly for the information of the authorities and partly as a warning to inhabitants.

The records preserve some striking glimpses of areas we do not normally associate with cinnamon. A Dutch governor deplored the number of valuable bushes being “pitifully cut down for firewood especially near Liveramentu (Thimbirigasyaya-Narahenpita) where it grows luxuriantly.”

It is difficult now to associate Thimbirigasyaya and Narahenpita with luxuriant cinnamon, yet that is precisely why this cartographic detail matters. Pepiliyana, Nawala, Welikada, Wellawatte and other familiar names cease for a moment to be simply modern suburbs and become part of an older cinnamon geography.

In this sense, the Salpiti map performs a different task from Van Campen’s. The first shows the astonishing geographical reach of the cinnamon enterprise. Salpiti brings us down almost plot by plot.

Down to the Individual Tree

A third example reduces the scale to a single piece of ground. Three charts dated 1720 depict a chena called Katugalavila in the village of Degambedda in Hevagam Korale, about half an hour’s journey from the fort at Hanwella. The original survey was by L. Boomgart; the version reproduced by Brohier and Paulusz is an 1899 facsimile by M. F. N. Rotteveel.

The three drawings show the same ground before clearing, after cutting and burning, and after planting and regrowth. Seventeen kinds of tree are identified by letters, with their Sinhala names recorded in Dutch spelling. Before clearing, the plot contained five cinnamon trees; in the third stage it contained 229 cinnamon shoots and young trees. Brohier called the plan both “a picture of the ground” and a “working-plan,” and remarked on its striking representation of detail and use of colour.

This small survey is useful here chiefly because it shows just how far Dutch cartographic attention could descend: from an extensive cinnamon country, to individual grounds, and finally to individual trees.

The 1719 map shows the cinnamon country extending from the Chilaw River to Dondra. The Salpiti Korale map brings us into recognizable localities around Colombo and its suburbs. At Degambedda, near Hanwella, the cartographic lens descends to a single chena and finally to individual cinnamon trees.

Taken together, the three maps turn the broad designation Canelle Landen into something much more precise: a country of rivers, political boundaries and old administrative divisions; roads, villages and seasonal encampments; identifiable cinnamon grounds; and, finally, individual plants.

They also help explain the practical appeal of later attempts to concentrate cinnamon production in more accessible and systematically cultivated grounds. Van Campen’s map makes visible the enormous geographical reach of the older, dispersed system—the distances travelled, the seasonal encampments and the labour required to bring the prepared bark to the coast. The hardships of that system are less visible on the map itself, but they are amply recorded in the contemporary documentation. The later transformation of cinnamon cultivation is another chapter. These maps preserve the geography that preceded it.

Retracing the Circuit

There is a modern postscript to this story. In recent years, the Pekoe Trail, a long-distance walking route through the tea estates of the hill country, has offered a new way of experiencing Ceylon’s montane landscape and tea heritage. The Cinnamon Captain’s circuit suggests the possibility of a low-country counterpart.

It need not be a walking trail. Selected stages of the forty-six-point circuit could be retraced largely by road, linking surviving place names and old cinnamon localities with places where cinnamon is still cultivated today. The korales no longer function as administrative divisions, roads have changed and much of the old cinnamon country has been transformed or built over, but enough of the underlying geography survives to make the old route intelligible.

Three centuries ago the circuit was travelled at the commencement of the harvest by an official inspecting the cinnamon country. Retraced today, it could offer a way of rediscovering a geography that these extraordinary maps have preserved in remarkable detail.

Notes: This article draws extensively on Volume II of R. L. Brohier and J. H. O. Paulusz’s Land, Maps & Surveys: A Descriptive Catalogue of Historical Maps in the Surveyor General’s Office, whose detailed descriptions, annotations and translations of Dutch maps and records make it possible to reconstruct much of the geography discussed here.

Images 3–5 reproduced from R. L. Brohier and J. H. O. Paulusz, Land, Maps & Surveys, Vol. II (1951).

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Features

Eastern University and the making of a culture of peace

Published

12 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

There is an important change in the way peace is being understood in Sri Lanka. The notion that peacebuilding is not simply the responsibility of governments, politicians and peace organisations, but is also a responsibility of educational institutions, appears to be permeating the consciousness of at least a section of the academic community. This was visible on International Peace Day at an event held at Eastern University by the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences. The event was unusual not least because the medical and nursing faculty of the university had decided that peacebuilding was relevant to its academic and professional responsibilities.

Peacebuilding has too often been treated as something undertaken after conflict, when the fighting has stopped and the immediate task is to rebuild relationships between communities. But peace cannot be sustained by governments and peace organisations alone. If it is to become long lasting, the values and practices of peace have to become part of the institutions through which a society educates its younger generations. Universities and other educational institutions are therefore important to peacebuilding. They are among the places where the foundations of a culture of peace can either be built or neglected.

The experience of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University provides a practical example of what this can mean. Led by its Dean, Prof Thillainathan Sathaananthan, the faculty organised an event which went beyond the ordinary academic scope of a medical faculty. University academics are experts in writing project proposals and applying for research grants. On this occasion, the members of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences used those skills to apply for a UNESCO grant that they won to conduct an International Peace Day event. The significance lies less in the Rs 200,000 grant than in the decision to use the university’s institutional capacity and resources to invest in peacebuilding. The event at Eastern University needs to be understood as more than a successful university programme. It represents a possible paradigm shift in peace thinking.

Institutional Commitment

The Peace Day event obtained the support of the university administration, including Vice Chancellor Prof P Peratheepan, and reached out to secondary schools in the vicinity to mobilise their attendance. The event itself was meticulously organised. There were cultural items including traditional and modern dance and song in the three languages, performed by combinations of solo, duet and multiple singers, dancers and actors drawn in part from nearby secondary schools. There was a panel discussion by senior academics on the general theme of peacebuilding and how to prepare for it. A discussion among the students followed, where each student spoke on behalf of a religion that was not theirs. This is significant because peacebuilding cannot remain an idea discussed by specialists at conferences. It has to become part of the way institutions educate and prepare people for life in a plural society.

The Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University has provided a model through its Peace Medicine course modules that were introduced to the curricular as a compulsory core course over 10 years ago. Two senior academics, Dr Kuveriel Eliyas Karunakaran and Dr Thillainathan Sathaananthan, have written a book on “Peace Medicine- A Health Care Concern” that was published five years ago. Its Peace Medicine Module integrates principles of medical ethics, compassion, equity, social justice and community engagement into health education and practice. In his introduction, former Vice Chancellor of Eastern University, Prof T Jayasingam noted “This book is an introduction to a theme which had already been operating in the Faculty of Health Care Sciences as a course.”

Doctors, nurses and health workers know better than anyone the harm that war and violence does. They are the people who treat the wounds and trauma that violence leaves behind. In a hospital, a patient is not asked what their religion or ethnicity is before they are treated. Health care is one of the places where peace is practised every day. The Faculty has therefore found a way of connecting its professional responsibilities with the wider social responsibility of peacebuilding. The question is whether this experience can be replicated throughout the country, at universities and at other educational institutions, so that peacebuilding becomes part of the consciousness of education itself. If that happens on a sufficient scale, it can begin to generate a culture of peace that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

Local Action

The Eastern University event corresponded closely to the United Nations theme for this year’s International Day of Peace, “Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day”, which honours the “everyday architects of peace”, people driving local action, laying the groundwork for stability and building lasting peace from the ground up. The emphasis on investment is important. An investment means that something is put in: time, courage and resources. There is no more violent conflict in Sri Lanka today. But the absence of war does not automatically produce a culture of peace. The factors that fed the country’s conflict have not disappeared from the world. Racism, corruption and the violation of laws and human rights are the raw materials of conflict. So too are unresolved grievances, discrimination and the failure to recognise the suffering of others.

A country that does not deal with its past does not escape it. The past can return in the next generation. This is why the experience of Eastern University needs to be replicated countrywide, both at universities and at other educational institutions. The objective should not be to turn every academic discipline into peace studies. Rather, peacebuilding needs to become part of the consciousness of education itself. Eastern University shows that a medical faculty can develop Peace Medicine. A law faculty can examine the relationship between justice, rights and peace. Faculties of education can prepare teachers to work in diverse communities, while the humanities and social sciences can examine the different narratives through which communities understand their histories. Every institution can find its own way of making peacebuilding relevant to what it teaches.

Sri Lanka has had many declarations, pledges and programmes in the past. What matters is whether these produce changes in behaviour and institutional practice. Peacebuilding requires confronting difficult issues rather than avoiding them. It requires respect for different identities, but also engagement across those identities. It requires dealing with grievances in the present while also addressing unresolved issues from the past. It requires truth, accountability, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. It requires people to learn that the rights of another community do not diminish their own rights. The International Peace Day event at Eastern University was evidence of a change in the way at least some academics in a part of the country deeply affected by war are thinking about their responsibilities. Peace needs to be invested in and the most important investment will be in the minds of those who will inherit the future.

Features

Quality assured education commodities

Published

12 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Ahilan Kadirgamar

I have always noticed the little paper tags that are inside the packaging of some products that say quality assured or quality control. I often wonder who might have checked the product and stamped that tag, but I also forget the tag soon enough. Decades later, when I entered academia, I was taken aback by the emphasis placed on quality assurance in our universities. It is not something that could be forgotten and done away with; the entire university system is obsessed with quality assurance.

Beginning with the staff induction programme, quality assurance is drilled into the newly recruited lecturers. It is the norm, not seen as doing any harm and only trying to improve quality. It is accepted as given, and not questioned. Quality Assurance Cells and Committees are omnipresent and hover above the Departments and, at times, even the Faculty Boards. Quality Assurance reviews are feared by the Deans and Vice Chancellors. University life itself seems secondary to the rule of quality assurance. What do we make of this system of quality assurance and what are its implications for our university system?

Corporate speak

Universities globally have been going through major changes with neoliberal education policies. In many countries, universities increasingly became corporatised to be run like businesses in the 1980s. As state support for universities declined, cost cutting became the norm. They started hiring adjunct or part-time staff. Many public non-fee levying universities around the world began to charge fees. Decade by decade, tuition fees became more and more exorbitant, forcing students to take student loans. The total student debt in the United States now stands at close to US$ 2 trillion; which is about 20 times the GDP of Sri Lanka. As the higher education landscape transformed in the West, university administrations began to recruit Presidents, Vice Chancellors and administrative officials with corporate backgrounds and experience.

Such corporatisation of universities in the West has since been imported into countries like Sri Lanka, introducing a new corporate vocabulary, including quality assurance, graduate competencies, programme outcomes, intended learning outcomes, etc. University teaching has become secondary to documenting so-called outcomes. The teacher-student relationship, the environment of the lecture hall and even administering the university have been over-determined by the processes of ensuring quality. How did such major changes come about in such a short time? Indeed, academics of just two generation ago, would never have heard of these terms and processes in the Sri Lankan university system.

World Bank Trojan horse

Since the early 2000s there have been a number of World Bank projects that have drastically changed the character of Sri Lankan universities. Quality assurance as a central agenda within universities, and many other changes to the working of our universities, came through these World Bank initiatives. The Improving Relevance and Quality of Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) project and Higher Education for the 21st Century (HETC) project were two such earlier projects that set up the Quality Assurance and Accreditation Unit (QAAU) under the University Grants Commission (UGC) and established systematic quality assurance reviews for state universities. The public often thinks these are grants from the World Bank to modernise our universities. However, they are not grants but loans.

The most recent such project, Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) is a US$ 100 million loan from the World Bank implemented from 2018 to 2023, which consolidated the quality assurance structures from the earlier projects. Furthermore, these projects are implemented with tremendous arrogance, prioritising their implementation over all other concerns in the universities, when the project over six years for example accounts for just one fourth of our budget allocation for universities this year.

The AHEAD project drastically changed course curricula, sought to increase student enrolment in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) disciplines, commercialise the university research agenda and create university-business linkages. All of this was pushed to supposedly help us face development challenges. We have heard the ideological attack on our universities and even students claiming they are “unemployable graduates”. These changes to our higher education system were supposedly going to create jobs and increase employment.

The irony of the AHEAD project is that just as it was ending in 2023, apparently after having reached its targets, the Sri Lankan economy was collapsing. The World Bank often gets the direction of causality wrong. It is the economy that creates jobs for graduates, and not the training or kind of graduates that create jobs. It is decades of World Bank policies, and those of its ideological twin the IMF, that have led to such high youth unemployment, not only in Sri Lanka but also in many other countries in the global South.

Sri Lanka entered an IMF agreement in March 2023 and started a new Country Partnership Framework with the World Bank in June 2023. These programmes have little to say about, and actively discourage, government initiatives that aim to create an industrial policy or an employment creation policy. Instead, they push for austerity measures, which not only restrict the allocation for education among other sectors, but also end up contracting the economy to the detriment of increasing employment. Their goal is the commercialisation of higher education, to make universities into businesses and run them like factories.

In this context, the ideology of quality assurance is powerful. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), whose different standards are necessary for marketing, is the institution that came up with the concept of “quality assurance”. It promoted quality assurance as a process of identifying defected products. Therefore, when the World Bank promotes this conceptual framing, our students are, in fact, seen as products on the assembly line, with quality assurance processes aiming to prevent the release of defected products from the university system. For the US$ 100 million we borrowed for the AHEAD project and the many more million dollars in similar World Bank projects, there is no evidence of increased employment of graduates.

Commodity fetishism

Over a century and a half ago, Karl Marx critiqued the economic analysis prevalent at that time that associated some inherent or monetary value for commodities without considering the social relations that underlie the production of those commodities. Marx called this commodity fetishism. Furthermore, he theorised that such commodity fetishism was also a reason for the alienation of human beings from the world. If our labour and what we produce is seen devoid of the social relations that underlie them, we lose our connection with the people and the world. In this process we become alienated from what we produce and the world.

We are now in a world where our students themselves are fetishised as commodities for the market. Universities are no longer communities concerned about knowledge and human growth, but mere factories producing commodities, which have to be produced without defects to be marketed. In this way, quality assurance has become the cause for the alienation of students, academics and our universities themselves, from the larger relationship with our economy and society.

Our university system does need reform. It is grossly underfunded and not providing the financial support and facilities for our students. Universities have become hierarchical spaces without the academic freedom and democratic ethos necessary for producing knowledge. Academics and students need to engage more with their communities to make their learning and research meaningful, not to mention their contribution to and integration with society. However, when it comes to even questions of governance and regulation of the universities, such concerns are merely reduced to improving quality. In our contemporary times, this singular focus on quality assurance, as opposed to addressing the larger structural issues, is crippling our universities. There may be no way out, but to put back quality assurance where it started, those little tags on goods, to perhaps be noticed but quickly forgotten.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and Senior Lecturer, University of Jaffna.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies)

Features

Thailand’s biggest new global star …

Published

12 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

The entertainment scene, globally, is agog with excitement, and, why not!

Yes, a new global star has emerged … from Thailand, and she hit the headlines by winning America’s Got Talent.

Rattikarn Amloy, known to millions by her stage name Nene Royal, was crowned the winner of America’s Got Talent (AGT) Season 21 at the live finale at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, California, taking home the USD 1 million grand prize.

The 16-year-old rocker, from the holiday island of Phuket (I’ve been to Phuket, courtesy Tourism Authority of Thailand), has struck a power chord around the world, and is the first Thai national ever to win the hit NBC show.

She beat nine other finalists, including runner-up magician Geno Ploeger, after a blistering final performance.

Nene’s story is pure rock and roll fairy-tale. She says she picked up a guitar at age seven, fell in love at the first chord, and taught herself mostly by watching videos online. That dedication earned her a music scholarship to Kajonkiet International School Phuket.

Her audition at America’s Got Talent — a swaggering, shredding rendition of The Cranberries’ classic ‘Zombie’ — exploded online, amassing over 200 million views across AGT’s platforms, more than any act this season.

She kept wowing: ‘Hysteria’ by Muse, then ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden which earned her Spice Girl Mel B’s Golden Buzzer, sending her straight to the live shows.

For the final, she unleashed ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. Judge Howie Mandel shouted: “You should win. Give her the million, America.” Mel B praised her “mysterious, mystical stage presence”.

And for the grand finale, she lived every teen rocker’s dream — performing on stage, alongside US rock giants Linkin Park.

When host Terry Crews announced her as winner, the teenager collapsed to the stage floor in tears. “I’m very happy and you know I’m emotional right now,” she said.

And Thailand erupted. Her school held watch parties, posting: “You did it, congratulations, champion. We are so proud of you.”

Even Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul sent a personal congratulation. He had earlier hosted Nene at Government House in July, where she played guitar while he sang a Thai rock song. His office said her talent “brought pride to Thai people.”

Corporate Thailand also rallied behind her — Charoen Pokphand Foods, owned by billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, even rented a giant billboard in Times Square, New York, to cheer her on.

With her blistering guitar solos, rock-ballad shrieks and fearless spirit, little Nene Royal has just become Thailand’s biggest new global star.

What’s more, this amazing teenager will be bringing her powerful vocals, guitar skills and signature rock-metal style to the stage, as opening act, before one of the world’s biggest rock bands, America’s Avenged Sevenfold, in Singapore, on 13 October.

Unfortunately, we are still to see a local artiste, grab the spotlight, on a global scale … like Thailand’s Nene.

Yes, they do shine, but mostly on social media, and that, too, with the aid of AI (Artificial Intellegence).