P960

Route de Colombo à Kandy (Ceylan) Mai 1841. [An elephant carriage and other travellers.]

Lithograph of an elephant carriage and other travellers on the road from Colombo to Kandy in Sri Lanka by L.H. de Rudder (1807-1881) after the original drawing by Prince Aleksandr Mikhailovich Saltuikov of May 1841 and published in 1848.Sri Lanka was a Portuguese colony from the late 16th Century until it was overruled by the Dutch; a colony which lasted until the arrival of the British in the late 18th century. The hill country capital of Kandy was the last kingdom to succumb to foreign rule, to the British in 1815. T.H.Holdich wrote in the Imperial Gazetteer of India: "No measured language can express the beauties of Ceylon scenery. From Colombo to Kandy, where a lake set in the hills reflects the visions of palms and temples, and the many-coloured array of...buildings below the long slopes of the shadowing mountains: and from Kandy to Nuwara Elia...there are endless vistas of transcendent beauty."