What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast
Oct 30, 2026 · 28 min · 9 segments
What makes elephants so quintessentially Sri Lankan – and what have they to do with its last great ancient kingdom - Polonnaruwa?
David SwarbrickHost
It presided over a looking-glass kingdom, one that its kings most carefully constructed, a realm of reflected, remembered confidence, built in conscious memory to replicate the past glories of Alarandapura, the great city from which several dynasties of earlier ancient kings had ruled more or less the entire island for almost 1,500 years.
For now we see through a glass darkly, wrote Saul of Tarsus, almost a thousand years before the Pulinura kings ever arrived, but then face to face.
And face to face was what these kings sought as they gazed into a mirror for inspiration.
Certainly everything that had been and was lost when Arandanapura was destroyed, yet more so.
In their 160-year rule, the Pulunarua kings strove to do more than merely copy the past.
Yet they did so so quickly and with such emphasis that, in the very act of creation, they exhausted their young kingdom and fatally undermined its capacity to endure.
And though its 160 years never came anywhere close to Anuradhapura's 1500, it nevertheless and most unexpectedly equalled and in some ways outstripped the brilliance of what had been destroyed when the Indian Chola kings had razed the old singular kingdom to the ground.
Smaller, sharper, more ambitious, more concentrated and most tellingly, in, for example, its buildings and even its kings, a now utterly unmistakable coming together of the two different cultural and religious traditions that had come to characterise the island.
It is remarkable that it managed this, despite the colossal influence of the past, the titanic golden shadow of the butchered city of Anuradha Pura, which cast its shape, mores, capabilities and standards across the newly risen kingdom of Pulunarua.
It presided over a looking-glass kingdom, one that its kings most carefully constructed, a realm of reflected, remembered confidence, built in conscious memory to replicate the past glories of Alarandapura, the great city from which several dynasties of earlier ancient kings had ruled more or less the entire island for almost 1,500 years.
For now we see through a glass darkly, wrote Saul of Tarsus, almost a thousand years before the Pulinura kings ever arrived, but then face to face.
And face to face was what these kings sought as they gazed into a mirror for inspiration.
Certainly everything that had been and was lost when Arandanapura was destroyed, yet more so.
In their 160-year rule, the Pulunarua kings strove to do more than merely copy the past.
Yet they did so so quickly and with such emphasis that, in the very act of creation, they exhausted their young kingdom and fatally undermined its capacity to endure.
And though its 160 years never came anywhere close to Anuradhapura's 1500, it nevertheless and most unexpectedly equalled and in some ways outstripped the brilliance of what had been destroyed when the Indian Chola kings had razed the old singular kingdom to the ground.
Smaller, sharper, more ambitious, more concentrated and most tellingly, in, for example, its buildings and even its kings, a now utterly unmistakable coming together of the two different cultural and religious traditions that had come to characterise the island.
It is remarkable that it managed this, despite the colossal influence of the past, the titanic golden shadow of the butchered city of Anuradha Pura, which cast its shape, mores, capabilities and standards across the newly risen kingdom of Pulunarua.
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