“If,” promised M.K. Gandhi, “you give me rice, I'll eat today; if you teach me how to grow rice, I'll eat every day.” Gandhi only visited Sri Lanka once – in 1927 – which may explain why, erudite though his aphorism was, it remained, all the same, a lesson that had already been learnt long ago on the island - thousands of years ago, in fact, in the very earliest days of recorded Lankan history.

Ever since the first distinctive water technology was introduced by the early Anduraupuran kings with the creation of the massive Panda Wewa reservoir around 450 BCE, their kings could provide an ever greater abundance of water, delivered just when and where it was needed. It was a proficiency that enabled an entire island to feed itself without trouble. Tummies full, its people could focus instead on the other great matters of life – religion, for example, war, politics, poetry – or the slow contemplation of a temple lotus pond during a long post-lunch siesta.

This particular pastime – or ones not dissimilar to it – is still greatly prized here today. Sophisticated water technology made the island’s paddy fields so fecund that the country barely needed to bother much with the enrichments of trade or the grubby task of making excessive money. As the ancient world’s merchant ships crossed the Indian Ocean from China to Arabia, they may have made a point of stopping in Sri Lanka to buy its gems, spices, Mannar pearls, elephants, and hardwoods - but the riches this all brought were just icing. The country was already rich.

And it was this richness that the last Lambakanna kings had on their side as the kingdom they ruled moved to its apogee. The great gilded last moments of Edwardian England were fuelled by cotton; the Ming by the porcelain trade; and ancient Athens, silver from the Laurion mines. But here it was rice – plentiful, abundant, nurturing rice.

Rice would have arrived with the island’s Mesolithic settlers, and it was first evidenced archaeologically around 800 BCE. Excavations made in the Anuradhapura area unearthed a remarkably large early Iron Age settlement – at least ten hectares, still with the spectral trace of irrigation systems and rice cultivation. The Mahavamsa Chronicle, starting a few hundred years later, around 540 BCE, noted that the island’s first recorded queen, Kuveni, showed rice to Prince Vijaya, the country’s founding paterfamilias. Vijaya’s hungry followers wasted little time, for the Chronicle goes on to document how they all then set about making themselves a fortifying lunch of rice and curry.

The plentiful supply of rice, even then, was due to small village tanks and their ability to harness and store water. They did so in systems that brought together up to 10 individual tanks within a small land basin measuring about 6 to 10 square miles, recycling water along the path from the reservoir to the field. Historians have estimated that in just one area in the north central part of the island – an area otherwise noted for its dryness – 450 such systems may have existed at some time between the second and the fifth centuries BCE, containing about 4,200 small tanks.

Ptolemy, writing in faraway Rome sometime between 127 and 170 CE, reported that the “country produces rice, honey, ginger, beryl, and hyacinth, and has mines of every sort, of gold, silver, and other metals. Large Tank systems followed the village ones – such as the Abhayavapi at Anuradhapura, the Tissa vava and the Nuwara vava. And from the fifth century CE onward, extremely long canals were added to the water network, opening up vast new areas for rice cultivation. By the sixth century, there was barely any suitable land in the entire Dryzone that had not been turned into paddy.

Of course, there were, from time to time, droughts, with at least six mentions of them cropping up in the ancient chronicles between 161 and 569 CE - but they seem to have been far less devastating here than in other parts of South Asia. The Samantapasadika, an ancient chronicle written by a monk called Buddhaghosa in Anuradhapura between 927 and 973 CE, notes the extreme care the state took to mitigate periods of water scarcity. “During the draught season,” it states, “when water becomes scarce, water is released in intervals. If someone does not receive his due share during the interval allocated to him and the crops become withered, then another should not receive his share during his allocation. If any monk drives water from a secondary canal to a field belonging to someone else, to a canal or a field belonging to him or to someone else, or covers the catchment, then he has committed the offence of avahara.”

The highly specific administrative and legal infrastructure that the state wrapped around water collection and extraction gave it an unparalleled ability to manage droughts – a capability other parts of South Asia lacked to anything like the same degree. One ancient chronicler remarked that “by attending facilities for the cultivation of fields by means of tanks, he (the king) dispelled the famine in prosperous Lanka.”

By the time the last of the Lambakarna kings came to rule in 691 CE, the country had been functioning as a recorded state for over 1,200 years. Rice had become the petrol of the nation. In this, Sri Lanka was little different to most other Asian countries – but what set it apart was its sheer abundance, its ability to power the kingdom so very effectively through good times and bad.

Indeed, when the last of the Lankbranaka fell in 993 CE and the country embarked on hundreds of years of uncertain life, even this did not bring rice production to its knees. To hold this almost folkloric expectation - this expectation that you will not entirely starve - was a rare assurance in those pre-modern times; and the patriotic confidence it engendered is tellingly evident, even today. Other things may be wrong, even very badly wrong, but, so the feeling goes, we will feed ourselves, we will go on, we will get better. As one Singhala idiom puts it: "rather than cursing the darkness, it is better to light a lamp."

Famine, scarcity, hardship – these are not conditions unfamiliar to Sri Lanka, then or now, but the island has largely escaped the widespread devastation that has gripped its neighbours, a theme that runs through its history from its earliest recorded times. North of Sri Lanka, uncountable millions died of famine in British colonial India - 36 famines in around 200 years. So appalling were they that people’s bodies actually evolved to store food as fat differently, so that their descendants now face significant health complications. Even before this period, famine routinely crippled the sub-continent. Over 1700 years from the 1st century CE, over 75 famines are recorded, with some, such as that in the Deccan in the 1630s, the Punjab in the mid-13th century and South India in the 11th century, being monumentally destructive. But not here.

"Flowers grow beneath her feet,” wrote Rani Manicka in her novel, “The Rice Mother,” “but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams." In the simplest of algebraic formulas, advanced water technology enabled the plentiful production of rice, or, more directly, an innate island-wide self-confidence: however bad life sometimes got, it rarely if ever reached the draconian depths other countries encountered. Sri Lanka was different, and it was rice, the very thing it had most in common with all other Asian countries, which set it apart.

Rice still sits at the epicentre of all the island’s Buddhist services, at Pereheras, Yak and Bali ceremonies, distributed at every important occa...