X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Ceylon


Andrew Nicholl

He rewarded his patron (by then Colonial Secretary) by illustrating parts of the latter's descriptive book about the island, Ceylon, Physical, Historical and Topographical.

Ceylon, Indiana

Ceylon is an unincorporated town in Wabash Township, Adams County, Indiana.

Ceylon, Saskatchewan

He may have chosen the name Ceylon in recognition of a CPR station of the name in Ontario, or it may have been named for a yacht that was owned by Scottish merchant Sir Thomas Lipton (whose name still graces tea bags to this day).


Action of 13 November 1943

The message was then relayed to the submarine operating in the area: HMS Taurus under the command of Lieutenant Commander Mervyn Wingfield operating from a base in Ceylon.

Alfred Dent

Other business positions held by Dent included chairmanship of the Caledonian (Ceylon) Tea Estates and the Shanghai Electric Construction Company and directorships of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, the London County and Westminster Bank and the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation.

Bandar Abbas

In the year 630 CE, Maharaja Derbar Raja of Gemeron was defeated in battle and escaped to Ceylon, and he was later blown off course by a storm to the remote shores of Kuala Sungai Qilah, Kedah (now Malaysia).

Cec Pepper

He fought in World War II in the Middle East and New Guinea, and at the end of the war he played for Australian Services cricket teams in England (the "Victory Tests" series) in 1945 and in India, Ceylon and Australia in 1945–46.

Cenotaph War Memorial, Colombo

It was originally built in the 1920s to remember both Ceylonese and Europeans from Ceylon who were killed in World War I, was constructed at the Galle Face Green.

Ceylon Medical College

In 1839 Stewart-Mackenzie, the British Governor of Ceylon, started sending a small number of Ceylonese to study medicine in Calcutta.

Charles Hutton Gregory

Gregory was consulting engineer of several major railway construction works, including those in Ceylon, Trinidad, Cape Colony, Perak and Selangor.

Demala diviyan keliya

It is unknown how old the game is, but the game was described by H. Parker in his 1909 book Ancient Ceylon - An Account of the Aborigines and of Part of the Early Civilisation.

Desmond Lorenz de Silva

He is the son of Fredrick de Silva, MBE, formerly Ceylon's ambassador to France and Switzerland, and the grandson of The Honorable George E. de Silva.

Donald Rutnam

Born in Colombo, Ceylon, Rutnam was educated at Royal College Colombo where he captained the college cricket team at the Royal–Thomian.

Ernest de Silva

His great-grandfather, Emans de Silva Gunasekera and his grandfather, S. D. S. Gunasekera bequeathed the properties to his father, A. E. de Silva, who later became the wealthiest businessman in Ceylon, and named his son A. E. de Silva Jr.

Faculties and institutions of University of Peradeniya

A faculty of Agriculture was established in the University of Ceylon in-order to meet the requirements of man power for research and development of the agricultural industry in Sri Lanka.

G. L. Peiris

Born to Glanville Peiris, diplomat who was the former Director-General External Affairs, Ceylon's Ambassador to West Germany and Myanmar and Lakshmi Chandrika Peiris.

Galle Face Hotel

Radio Ceylon recorded music programmes from the Coconut Grove as well as the Galle Face Hotel itself, presented by some of the popular Radio Ceylon announcers in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Livy Wijemanne and Vernon Corea.

George Henry Kendrick Thwaites

In March 1849, on the death of George Gardner, Thwaites was appointed superintendent of the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, Ceylon.

Gladwin Kotelawala

With the on set of World War II, and the Japanese occupation of Malaya, he served as a price control inspector in Malacca before joining the Indian Independence League (IIL) of Subhas Chandra Bose and formed the Ceylon Department serving as its Secretary.

Gratien Fernando

Fernando’s father petitioned the army authorities to commute the death penalty and asked Sir Oliver Ernest Goonetilleke, the Civil Defence Commissioner, to intercede with Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton, the British Commander of Ceylon.

Greg Roskowski

Listeners to Radio Ceylon enjoyed his 'wakey wakey' style and he introduced the hit songs of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Bill Haley & His Comets, Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley to audiences in Ceylon and beyond.

Gunasena de Soyza

Gunasena de Soyza CMG OBE (20 December 1902 – 12 October 1961) was High Commissioner for Ceylon in Britain from 1960 until his death.

Gymnema lactiferum

James Emerson Tennent described the use of the plant in his account of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and wrote it was "evidently a form of the G. sylvestre".

Henri Marchal

In the meantime in 1938, on the way back to France, he visited India and Ceylon, which he described in Souvenirs d'un Conservateur, and before returning to Angkor he led an archeological mission at Arikamedu (called Virampatnam by the French), in Puducherry.

Henry Nottidge Moseley

Moseley delivered the Royal Society Croonian Lecture in 1878 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1879.He participated as naturalist in expeditions to Ceylon, to California, and to Oregon, and most notably he was in the HMS Challenger expedition of 1872 through 1876 which covered over 120,000 km.

James De Alwis

Educated at the prestigious Colombo Academy as one of its first students, he was part of the Macaulay of Ceylon along with Frederick Nell and his brother Louis, C.A.Lorensz, John Prins, Charle Ferdinands and Dandris de Silva Gunaratna inspired by the Young England movement.

James Ramsbotham, 2nd Viscount Soulbury

From the late 1950s he lived in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where his father had been Governor-General, as a Hindu yogi under the name Santhaswami.

Koil

The koil in Tamil Nadu and kovil of Ceylon has a long history and has always been associated with the ruler of the time.

Livy Wijemanne

Wijemanne worked very closely with the Australian administrator, Clifford Dodd who came to Radio Ceylon under the Colombo Plan.

Lucian Scherman

From October 1910 to December 1911, Scherman and his wife Christine undertook an extended research trip to Ceylon (today Sri Lanka), Burma (today Myanmar), and India (today India and Pakistan).

M. H. Gunaratne

Later he became the commanding officer of the 4 (V) Design Ceylon Engineers; Army units in Mannar; Echelon Barracks; Army units in Jaffna; Sri Lanka Army Pioneer Corps and the 1st Reconnaissance Regiment, Sri Lanka Armoured Corps.

M. J. Perera

Clifford Dodd, an Australian administrator, was appointed (via the Colombo Plan) as the first Director of the Commercial Service of Radio Ceylon and he contributed to the station's popularity across the Indian sub-continent.

Manicasothy Saravanamuttu

Manicasothy served as Ceylon's Commissioner in Singapore and Malaya (1950–1957), Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to Indonesia (1954–1957) during which time he was involved in organising the Asian-African Conference, better known as the Bandung Conference, in 1955 and Honorary Consul-General in Bangkok (1958–61).

He served as president of the Ceylon Cricket Association for about 14 years and the Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu Stadium, also known as the P Sara Oval or Colombo Oval, was named after him.

Mir Jumla II

Mir Jumla, who in the 1640s had his own ships and organized merchant fleets that sailed throughout Surat, Thatta, Arakan, Ayuthya, Balasore, Aceh, Melaka, Johore, Bantam, Makassar, Ceylon, Bandar Abbas, Mecca, Jeddah, Basra, Aden, Masqat, Mocha and the Maldives.

Muslim Nesan

The newspaper also carried an interview with the exiled Egyptian nationalist leader Ahmed Orabi, soon after his arrival in Ceylon.

Nicholas Chevalier

In 1869 he joined the H.M.S. Galatea as an artist with the Duke of Edinburgh, on the voyage to the East and back to London with stops in Tahiti, Hawaii, Japan, China, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India.

No. 354 Squadron RAF

The squadron redeployed to Minneriya in Ceylon on 12 October 1944, with detachments at Kankesanturai and Cuttack, and returned to Cuttack—maintaining a detachment at Kankesanterai—in January 1945, where they received the Liberator Mk.VI.

Philip Edmond Wodehouse

Wodehouse entered the Ceylon Civil Service at an early age and later served as superintendent of British Honduras from 1851 to 1854.

Prince of Wales tea blend

One Prince of Wales tea, for example, is a blend of "Assam black tea, Ceylon black tea, Gunpowder green tea, Lucky Dragon Hyson green tea, and natural black currant flavoring."

Robert Hedley

Hedley was posted to Ceylon where he drowned at Trincomalee on 29 January 1884, two weeks after his 27th birthday.

Roland Trimen

Trimen was born the son of Richard and Mary Ann Esther Trimen and was the elder brother of Henry Trimen, botanist and director of the botanical gardens at Peradeniya, Ceylon.

Rosemary Rogers

After spending three years at the University of Ceylon, Rogers became a reporter, and soon married Summa Navaratnam, a Ceylonese rugby player and track star (who played for Ceylon against the 1950 British Lions and who was known as "the fastest man in Asia").

Sinhala Kingdom

From Sinhala Diva' (Island of Sinhala) are derived the Persian/Arabic Serendip or Sarandib, and the European 'Ceilao', 'Zeylan' and 'Ceylon'.

Small Orange Tip

Colotis etrida, a species of Colotis endemic to Southern India and Ceylon commonly known as the Small Orange Tip or Little Orange Tip

Sri Palee College

Inspired by Guru Dev Rabindranath Tagore a great writer, artist and an educationist of India, and his famous university at Shanthi Niketan later called Visva Bharathi University, Mr. Wilmot A. Perera, a prominent revolutionary educationist and a politician of Sri Lanka, decided to establish a similar institution in Ceylon, and invited Gurudev Tagore to lay the foundation stone for this institution, which Tagore named Sri Palee (place where the goddess of fine arts lives).

Thomas Tapling

He was included in George Vernon's side for an 1889/90 tour of India and Ceylon but was unable to play after a close friend was taken ill in Italy and he opted to stay with him.

Wilhelm Geiger

The Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa and their historical development in Ceylon, translated into English by Ethel M. Coomaraswamy, Colombo 1908.

William Reierson Arbuthnot

Willy married Mary Helen Anstruther, the eldest daughter of Philip Anstruther, the Colonial Secretary of Ceylon on 9 December 1858.


see also