The teardrop island off the southern tip of India that became, for more than two thousand years, the great fortress of Theravada Buddhism and a crossroads of the Indian Ocean — home to the ancient hydraulic civilizations of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, the island where the Pali canon was first written down, ruled in turn by Sinhalese kings, south Indian invaders, and European traders, and torn in its modern life by a 26-year civil war between the Sinhalese-majority state and Tamil separatists that ended in 2009 amid mass civilian death.
On a plain in the dry north of an island, a fig tree has been tended by hand for more than two thousand years. People believe it grew from a cutting of the very tree the Buddha sat beneath when he awakened. It may be the oldest planted tree on earth with a known date. Around it rose a Buddhist civilization that built reservoirs the size of inland seas and brick domes taller than cathedrals, and that first committed the words of the Buddha to writing. The same island, in living memory, was torn apart by one of Asia's longest and cruelest wars.