Sometimes, very serious episodes in history sound incredibly silly. Such is the case with the British war against Kandy.

Though it may sound like an ill-conceived health campaign, this was not a war on “candy” as in sweets, but rather “Kandy” as in the kingdom in modern Sri Lanka, around the year 1800.

Sri Lanka

The British were not the first European colonial empire to try and conquer Kandy (also known by names such as Senkadagala and Mahanuwara). The Portuguese came in the 1500’s and conquered areas on the Sri Lankan coast, primarily to try and control the cinnamon trade. At the beginning this era, Kandy was just one of several local kingdoms in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon as it was then called), but by the early 1600s it had become the primary native power on the island. In 1638, Kandy enlisted the help of Portugal’s great rival, the Dutch, to drive out the Portuguese. The alliance was fragile at best, and the Dutch soon cemented themselves as even stronger rulers than the Portuguese ever were. Nevertheless, Kandy maintained its power in Ceylon’s central highlands, keeping the Dutch at bay.

Kandy in 1719 (yellow)

In 1795, Revolutionary France militarily supported a revolt in the Dutch Republic, overthrowing the ruling Stadtholder, William V of Orange, and establishing the Batavian Republic as a client state of France. William V fled to Britain, and called upon the Dutch colonies to hand control over to the British rather than the French.

Since the British Empire was solidly in its expansionary phase, they took this declaration as license to seize Dutch colonies by force, including Dutch Ceylon. And they were determined to gobble up Kandy once and for all.

Flag of Kandy

The First Kandyan war in 1803 saw two British forces set out from opposite coasts of the island, Colombo in the Southwest and Trincomalee in the Northeast. Though they reached as far as kingdom’s eponymous capital, a Kandyan counterattack wiped out both the garrison the British left in the capital and the rest of the army on its way back to the coast – both almost to the last man. The Kandyan counter-offensive proved equally fruitless in the face of overwhelming British firepower, and the first war ended in a stalemate by 1805.

The Second Kandyan War in 1815 went far differently. Ehelepola, the kingdom’s First Adighar (essentially prime minister), got involved in a failed palace plot and fled to British territory. In response, the King of Kandy, Sri Vikrama Rajasinghe, had Ehelepola’s family executed. Seeing the resulting split between the king and the nobility, the British sent a fresh invasion force. The swiftly captured the King and convinced the nobility to sign the Kandyan Convention, handing control of the country over to the British in exchange for guarantees of their power and protection of the Buddhist religion.

These guarantees were not to last, however. By 1817, the Kandyan nobles started a fresh revolt in response to what they saw as British violations of the Convention, including appointing an important religious leader without the nobles’ approval. The uprising was violently suppressed by the British military with the help of a force brought over from Madras in India. After the revolt, Kandy was fully annexed into the British empire.

Sri Lanka would remain under British rule until 1948, when it became independent as part of a broader movement among former British colonies in South Asia. Today, the city of Kandy (the Kingdom’s former capital) is a cultural and religious center for Sri Lanka, and a UNESCO world heritage site. And appropriately, it’s most notable attraction is the Temple of the Tooth.

Coming soon: The last Romans

Citations & further reading:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4416846 (Review of Kandy at War: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka 1594-1818 by Channa Wickremesekera)

dewaraja, Lorna. “THE KANDYAN KINGDOM : THE SECRET OF ITS SURVIVAL.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka Branch 30 (1985): 120–35. http://www.jstor.org.azp1.lib.harvard.edu/stable/23730765 .

Sujit Sivasundaram. “Tales of the Land: British Geography and Kandyan Resistance in Sri Lanka, c. 1803-1850.” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 5 (2007): 925–65. http://www.jstor.org.azp1.lib.harvard.edu/stable/4499807.