History Of Hambantota, Mothers Who Were Worried About Their Sons And Now

By Charitha Ratwatte -January 1, 2013 

Charitha Ratwatte

On this, the first day of the first month of 2013, readers, in these times of doom and gloom, would without doubt appreciate a success story about a group of determined women from a district far away from the capital city, supported by a group of sensitive bureaucrats, who have successfully built themselves and their institution into a world class micro finance institution.

Hambantota District’s history

Time was when the Hambantota District was a quiet backwater in Sri Lanka’s Deep South. In ancient times, when the Kingdom of Ruhuna was in existence, it was a highly-developed area. Extensive cultivation of rice and other crops supported by an intricate water management system was the base of a highly developed Buddhist culture and civilisation.

The high standards of the hydraulic civilisation which existed in the Raja Rata at those times would have undoubtedly spread to southern Sri Lanka. The name Wel-Laksha (Wellassa), land of one hundred thousand paddy fields, gives a clue to this economic powerhouse.

The area was also a focus for the extraction and distribution of salt to the rest of the country. The dry climate was ideal for collecting sea water in vast areas of low lying land on the coast, and letting the water evaporate under the heat of the glaring sun. The salt distribution was the monopoly of Muslim traders who took salt by pack bull to the interior hills and bartered it for spices which they brought back to Magampura and exported. Research has shown that the development of Muslim communities in the interior of the island have been on this salt route inland, roughly a day’s march apart.

Similarly, before the advent of the Europeans, the Muslims held the monopoly of the internal trade in salt and the external trade in spices. It was a fleet which set out from the Portuguese enclave of Goa on India’s west coast – to hunt down some Muslim pirates who basing themselves in the Maldives harassed Portuguese vessels competing with the Muslim traders for the spice trade – that was caught up in a South West monsoon storm, damaged its masts and had to limp into Galle harbour to effect repairs, that brought the first Portuguese to this island.

Ancient Magampura (today’s Hambantota) was a harbour on the southern sea route from the west to the east – what has today been branded as the Spice Route. Indeed some historians argue that the name Hambantota is derived from ‘Sampan Thota’ – the harbour used by Chinese sea going Sampans which traversed the southern seas in the 1400s well before the European colonisers arrived.
A stone plaque at Galle records that Admiral Cheng Ho visited the Galle Port with his fleet at that time and kidnapped the local ruler and took him and his family back to China. Some time ago the descendants of that family visited Sri Lanka as guests of the Government.

International flavour of Southern Sri Lanka                           Read More