Sinhalese

The Sinhalese are the Indo-Aryan people of Sri Lanka, whose ancestors settled it around the fifth century BCE. The Pali chronicle Mahavamsa traces them to Prince Vijaya's followers, and in the third century BCE Mahinda, son of Emperor Ashoka, preached Buddhism to them. Sinhala is an insular Indo-Aryan tongue attested in third-century-BCE rock inscriptions and written in its own script; by the thirteenth century it carried a Theravada literature alongside Pali.

For fifteen centuries the kingdoms of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa ruled the dry north, until south Indian invasions drove the court south into the wet hills. In 1337 the kings reigned from Gampola, later moving their capital to Kotte.

The Portuguese arrived in the early sixteenth century; the 1521 partition of Kotte opened succession wars that by 1597 left highland Kandy the only independent Sinhalese state. The Dutch displaced the Portuguese on the coasts before the British took those possessions and conquered Kandy in 1815, ending Sinhalese kingship.