The island · Est. antiquity
For three centuries,
Europe went to war
over bark.
Cinnamon grew abundantly in one place on earth, and everyone who found it tried to own it. This is the story of the island our spices still come from, and of the people who peeled them long before anyone in Europe knew where they grew.
Chapter One
A narrow belt of wet ground
Sri Lanka is a small island, but it is not one climate. A central massif splits it, and the south-west shoulder catches the monsoon while the north and east stay comparatively dry. That wet south-western quarter is where Cinnamomum verum grows best, in the strip of humid lowland running roughly from Negombo down through Colombo to Galle and Matara.
It is not a large area. You could drive its length in a morning. Yet for most of recorded history this was effectively the world’s only reliable source of true cinnamon, and everything that follows — the fleets, the forts, the treaties, the forced labour — happened because of a plant that was fussy about where it would grow.
Our cinnamon still comes from that belt. The cloves come from the same island, grown in the same wet-zone conditions.
Chapter Two
Before the ships came
Long before any European saw the island, cinnamon was already an organised trade. The peeling was done by the Salagama, a community whose skill was hereditary and specific: strip the paper-thin inner bark from a young shoot without tearing it, and roll the sheets into a quill while they are still damp.
The timing mattered. Peeling was done in the rainy season, when the wet bark was pliable and would lift cleanly rather than crack. The finished quills went to the king as tribute. The knowledge sat with the families who held it, and it was passed down rather than written down.
That method has not fundamentally changed. A quill rolled today is made the same way, by hand, by someone who learned it from someone else. It is the reason true cinnamon costs what it costs.
The bark is peeled while the rain is still on it. Dry bark cracks; wet bark rolls.
Chapter Three
The stories traders told
For centuries the people selling cinnamon in the Mediterranean would not say where it came from — and had every reason not to. The classical world received some remarkable explanations instead.
Herodotus recorded that giant birds gathered cinnamon sticks to build their nests on inaccessible cliffs, and that traders retrieved it by leaving out heavy joints of meat: the birds would carry the meat up, the nests would collapse under the weight, and the cinnamon would fall.
It is a good story, and it did its job. A spice that arrives with an origin myth attached is a spice whose supply chain nobody can go around. The mystery held until European ships found the island themselves.
Chapter Four
1505: the Portuguese
A Portuguese fleet under Lourenço de Almeida reached the island in 1505, and found the trade already in the hands of Arab merchants. Portugal took the coast, built forts — Colombo among them — and turned tribute into obligation.
The Salagama continued to peel, but no longer for a king. Production was directed toward the fortresses and from there to Lisbon. Portugal held that position for roughly a century and a half, and for much of the sixteenth century controlled the overwhelming share of Europe’s cinnamon.
The record of this period, written mostly by the people doing the taking, is thin on what it cost the people doing the peeling. What is clear is that a skilled craft became a compulsory one.
Chapter Five
1658: the Dutch
The Dutch East India Company took a different route in: it made terms with the inland Kingdom of Kandy, established a foothold in 1638, and by 1658 had pushed the Portuguese off the island entirely.
What followed was one of the most tightly held monopolies in the history of the trade. The VOC controlled the growing regions, dictated price and availability to the whole of Europe, and formalised the peelers’ obligation into hereditary compulsory service. When Salagama families tried to marry into other castes to escape the work, the Company legislated to close the route.
The Dutch also over-harvested. Wild trees were stripped faster than they could recover, and the Company eventually had to start planting its own — the beginning of cultivated cinnamon as opposed to foraged.
A monopoly is not only a commercial arrangement. Someone has to be prevented from leaving.
Chapter Six
1796: the British
Ceylon changed hands again during the Napoleonic Wars, when British forces took the island from the Dutch in 1796. The plantations came with it.
The British widened cultivation, brought in systematic agricultural methods, and did something commercially shrewd: they marketed the product by its species. Cheaper cassia from elsewhere in Asia was already being sold in Europe as cinnamon, and Ceylon’s growers needed a way to distinguish theirs. The phrase they leaned on was true cinnamon.
That distinction is still the one that matters, and it is still poorly understood by most shoppers two centuries later. It is the reason we write Cinnamomum verum on the pouch.
Chapter Seven
What is left of all that
The forts are still standing. Galle’s ramparts, Colombo’s harbour, the Dutch street plan in the old quarter — the architecture of a trade that treated an island as a warehouse.
The peeling has outlasted every empire that tried to own it. It is still a hand craft, still concentrated in the same wet south-western belt, still learned within families. The tools are simple, the skill takes years, and no machine has replaced it because a quill has to be rolled from bark thin enough to tear.
We buy from one processor in that belt rather than through a broker, which means each shipment traces to an identified batch. It is a small thing set against five centuries of history. But knowing exactly where a spice came from is precisely what nobody was allowed to know for most of that time.
The spices in this story
Grown in the belt described above, peeled and packed at origin, imported to Ontario by Ceylon Valley Inc.
See the range