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1866
 Henry Wickham (1846-1928) ventured from Britain to South America hoping to shoot exotic birds and ship home feathers for lady’s hats. This venture failed as the birds exploded from the rifle shots. He returned to the Amazon region and in 1876 gathered seeds of the Hevea brasiliensis tree, which produced latex. Less than 4% of some 70,000 seeds germinated, but this was enough to ship seedlings to Ceylon, India, Malaya and Singapore and begin a global rubber plantation boom.
Links: Brazil, Britain, Fashion, Explorer, Trees, Botany, Birds, Ceylon     Click to see the source(s) for this event 
 
1904
1911		 Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880-1969) served in the Ceylon Civil Service. He later authored “The Village in the Jungle,” a novel based on his time in Sri Lanka. In 2006 Victoria Glendinning authored “Leonard Woolf: A Life.”
Links: Britain, Writer, Sri Lanka, Ceylon     Click to see the source(s) for this event 
 
1937
 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) banned the capture of wild elephants. At the turn of the century some 10-15 thousand elephants roamed wild in Sri Lanka. By 2006 only some 3,000 were left.
Links: Sri Lanka, Animal, Ceylon     Click to see the source(s) for this event 
 
1972 May 22
 The island nation of Ceylon became the republic of Sri Lanka, which is Sinhala for resplendent land, with the adoption of a new constitution under PM Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Sinhala was made the official language and Buddhism the state religion.
Links: Sri Lanka, Ceylon     Click to see the source(s) for this event 
 
1972
 In Sri Lanka the Tamil New Tigers (TNT) was founded by Velupillai Prabhakaran, an eighteen-year-old school dropout, who was the son of a minor government official. TNT abandoned the political process altogether and geared itself for violence. The Tamil rebellion began and thousands were killed in the ultra-leftist campaign. Suicide bombers of the Tamil Tigers later killed Pres. Ranasinghe Premadasa and former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Links: Sri Lanka, Ceylon     Click to see the source(s) for this event 
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