452 



JOUKNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [Vol. IX. 



another in Ceylon should very early have interested the 

 visitors to the Island. 



In 550 B.C. Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived under Justi- 

 nian, states, upon the ground of reports from the Greek 

 traveller Sopater, that the natives of Ceylon belonged to 

 different races : he calls them expressly a\\6(pv\oi* Even the 

 Chinese were aware that the north of the Island was inhabited 

 by quite a different race from that of the south ; the men 

 in the north (the Tamils) they compare to the Hu (Hoo), 

 a people of Central Asia ; in the south (the Sinhalese) to 

 the Liau (Leaou), a mountain tribe in west China, to whom 

 they ascribed "large ears, long eyes, purple faces, black 

 bodies, moist and strong hands and feet," with a long life of 

 a hundred years and more, adding that the men, as well as 

 the women, wore their hair " long and flowing."! 



Evidently these old Chinese reporters found no analogy 

 between the Sinhalese and the Chinese themselves. Nor have 

 they, so far as I know, left behind any accounts from which 

 to conclude that a Chinese colonisation of the Island had ever 

 taken place. All that is gathered from their reports^ is con- 

 fined to information about the mercantile and religious institu- 

 tions, and to one warlike enterprise of the Chinese ; but the 

 reports do not come down further than the fourth century of 

 our era, and the defeat of a king of Ceylon by a Chinese army, 

 which occurred as late as the year 1408. Except the state- 

 ment that in the year 1266 Chinese soldiers entered the 

 military service of king Parakrama, there is no mention 

 made of any longer stay or actual settlement of the Chinese 

 in Ceylon. Notwithstanding this, the Portuguese writer 

 Ribeyro§ has expressed his opinion that the original popula- 

 tion of the Island may have been Chinese. Knox|| also 



* Tennent, I. c, I., p. 568. 



t Cited by Sir E. Tennent (I., p. 611) from Chinese works. 

 % Tennent, I. c, L, p. 607, et seq. 

 § Id., l*c, I., p. 327, mote 2. 

 |l Knox,»Z. c.,|p..61. 



