The Mango (Part 3): histories shaped under the mango tree

Two instances when the mango tree became iconic in Sri Lanka’s stories

In Sri Lanka, myths, faiths and histories are often woven around some kind of tree. From sagely Banyans, serene Bo’s to Neems and Jaks that bridge to the netherworlds, trees have often been made into icons and symbols of ideas close to local culture.

Among them, the mango tree appears again and again—not as a sacred shade, but as a witness. To sermons. To ships. To the tides of transformation.

Local artists and craftspeople depicted mango trees in art, wall paintings, and jewelry, as well as motifs on textile borders.

One of the oldest stories begins in Mihintale, where Sri Lankan chronicles tell of King Devanampiyatissa’s fated encounter with Mihindu Thero—an emissary monk sent by Emperor Ashoka to introduce Buddhism to the island. It wasn’t merely a meeting; it was a test of the King’s mind. And it happened in a mango grove.

To assess the King’s capacity to grasp Buddhist philosophy, Mihindu Thero posed a series of IQ tests on logic, language, and perception, in the form of riddles. The King answered wisely. And so, under the shade of mango trees, Buddhism formally took root in Sri Lanka. Mango, since this telling, has been used as an icon of philosophical awakening. Even today, in June, children across the island gather branches from mango trees to re-create the scene in miniature: the hunter king and the startled deer, Arahat Mihindu poised in serenity, the ancient mango grove where the exchange took place. These small sacred models sit on altars and school desks, immortalizing a mango-shaded moment when thought changed a nation.

The young leaves of mangoes take shades between tender orange and deep brown. Then, they grow into a vivid green before maturing into deep green. Areas like Mihintale in Sri Lanka, where mangoes grow in large groves, and are left untouched due to their historical significance, the tree tops take on colours from orange, brown, and vivid green to sombre green.

Another historic story took shape under a mango tree.

The origin of Colombo’s name, according to one etymological thread, points to a mango tree that never bore fruit. Kola-amba—meaning ‘leafy mango’—described a great mango tree near the mouth of the Kelani River. Vast and evergreen, yet never yielding fruit, the tree became a marker for seafarers for its sheer size. Kolamba thota—the port of the leafy mango—eventually became Colombo. To be named after a tree that offered no mangoes, yet remembered by every ship tracing the routes to riches; quite fitting for a city that barely a few can call home, but so many reside in.

Mangoes were among the most commonly documented trees by early visitors to Sri Lanka. 1656, the mankó, Michał Boym

The mango tree marks both a spiritual turning point of a nation and its colonial threshold. Trees do not pick sides, after all. They hold memory, not judgment. And in their shade—where faith began, where names were made—we are reminded how trees hold the stories of who we are, and where we’ve been.

Why things should be allowed to die

What Vesak lanterns teach us and when preservation becomes pathology

Walking past a school just before the Buddhist Vesak festival, I saw a group of young girls hang up lanterns with covers of transparent polymer. On the news, I saw coverage of the army dressing up the streets for Vesak with elaborately made lanterns, all protected from the elements by covers of plastic. With that, they reduced the profound lesson of the Vesak lantern and limited it to mere ornamentation.

2000, embassy Vesak lanterns covered in plastic

Vesak lanterns, traditionally made from bamboo and fragile tissue paper, carried the lesson of impermanence. As children, making a Vesak lantern—painstakingly tying bamboo pieces together—you learned about geometry as much as paper craft. It took days of cutting patterns and shapes and pasting them with a sticky homemade glue of flour and water. These were labours of love. But the lesson of the lanterns only revealed itself once they were hung outside, exposed to the elements. The Vesak festival, celebrated in the monsoony month of May, inevitably included rains. Nothing taught the Buddhist philosophy of impermanence like discovering the lantern you built, destroyed by rain. What was once loved and luminous now hung limp, skeletal, and beyond repair. It was a tradition that made the day after Vesak into a life lesson. Past the fairy tales, you had to reconcile with the reality of being alive. You came to understand that life and death weren’t opposing forces, but parts of the same process.

Covering this important lesson in plastic is a symptom of the deeper confusion of our time: the need to preserve what was never meant to last in an obstinate and unconscious drive to outsmart death.

1959 home and living magazine advertisement for Seran Wrap to ‘save’ things

Today, everything is wrapped in polymer sleeves. Earphones. Fruits. Flowers. Leftovers. Even the things that should be allowed to wither—old letters, sketchbooks, bills—are now preserved past their timeline. We keep birthday balloons. We vacuum-seal sentiments. We embalm objects not because they are precious, but because we can.

This isn’t preservation. This is pathology.

Plastic reflects our unspoken belief that decay is a problem. That entropy is failure. That change is loss. But when we try to keep the past intact, we keep the present from moving. We try to keep the earth from smelling like earth. We try to turn the world into a museum of itself.

2020, plastic is too expensive a ‘preservation’ tactic for the planet, Divotomezove

But what if we allowed things to soften? To shift? To be held for a while, then returned to the soil?

Not everything needs to be preserved.

Things need to be used.

Things need to end.

Things need to break down, to feed what comes next.

And perhaps the small return can begin—with one thing left uncovered. One child allowed to build a lantern that falls apart. One memory allowed to fade, so it can be reborn differently. We can choose to not plastic-coat rituals that honour impermanence.

Preservation is not the same as reverence. Stories don’t need to last forever to mean something.

The Mango (Part 2): a fruit carried by trade winds, power, and persistence

How South Asia’s iconic fruit left home and entered global culture

In Part 1 of our story on the mango, we discussed how this fruit was part of South Asian lives for centuries, and remains to stay so. If in South Asia the mango was a metaphor for life's richest ties—myth, memory, friendship—then it was only a matter of time before it became a story the world would carry, reshape, and consume.

circa 1765, Women Enjoying the River at the Forest's Edge, Hunhar II

Colonization, trade, and diplomacy during the early modern era (1500s onwards) uprooted not only goods exchange but also food and farming practices. Along the humid trade routes of the East India Companies, among the many treasures from the East, mangoes travelled. Seeds carefully packed for colonial gardens, descriptions of their ‘luscious flesh’ written into ship journals and diplomatic letters. By the 17th century, mango trees bloomed in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Brazil, while mangoes themselves acquired new roles—not as sacred symbols, but as exotic commodities and markers of wealth or influence.

1891, Mango, from the Fruits series (N12) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes Brands commercial colour lithograph, Allen & Ginter and Geo. S. Harris and Sons.

One of the most surreal twists that placed the mango as a symbol of Maoist reforms came about in 1968, during a period of intense political upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Arshad Hussain gifted a crate of Pakistani mangoes to Chairman Mao Zedong. At that time, mangoes were an exotic rarity in China, and Mao himself wasn’t particularly interested in them—he didn't even eat them—but in a gesture both practical and symbolic, he re-gifted the mangoes to the Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams, factory workers who had helped suppress the violent student factions at Tsinghua University. The workers, unfamiliar with the fruit, interpreted it as a profound token of Mao’s personal gratitude and divine favour. Mangoes were paraded, sealed in wax, displayed in glass cases, and even boiled into water that workers ceremonially drank. The mango became a quasi-sacred object, and 'mango worship' swept across China as a unique (and strange) manifestation of the Cultural Revolution’s devotion culture.

Exhibit in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon - Eugene, Oregon, USA.

Later, replicas of mangoes were mass-produced in wax and porcelain, and mango-themed items flooded Chinese markets—from bedsheets to enamelware. Though the ‘mango cult’ eventually faded, it left a lasting imprint on Chinese cultural memory: a tropical fruit, once symbolizing abundance and sweetness in South Asia, had been reframed into a divine emblem of political loyalty halfway across the world.

Yet even as the mango became imbued with the symbolism of different empires, its imagery persisted and evolved.

mid-17th century, Mango-Shaped Flask, Islamic Art, Met Museum

The distinctive mango shape, which had flourished for centuries in South Asian textiles, jewelry, and folk art, was exported along with fabrics. Through contact with Persian and Kashmiri artisans, the mango motif was stylized into the now-famous paisley pattern—a teardrop-shaped design that captivated the textile industries of Europe. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the paisley had become a fashion craze in Britain and France, a marker of the ‘exotic East’ prized by aristocrats and later bohemian circles in the 1960s and 70s. It remains to date, an abstracted yet perfectly associated symbol of the exotic East, of utopia, of faraway wonder, as the paisley.

19th century, Sheet with overall paisley pattern, decorative paper, Met Museum

The mango’s symbolism shifted with each crossing. What began as a sacred and intimate fruit of the tropics became a fashionable signifier of taste, leisure, and otherness in the world’s imagination. Still, the deeper meanings refused to vanish completely. In diaspora communities, in memory, in South Asian kitchens blooming across cities like London, Toronto, and Melbourne, the mango remained a portal to childhood, to festivals, to the heavy sweetness of a South Asian summer. Recipes travelled too—mango pickles, chutneys, lassis—and with them, stories of migration, resilience, and belonging. Still today, to taste mango is to taste paradise; this has not changed.

---

The delight of the mango is not only in the vividness of its taste but also in its exquisite shape, tracing a smiling side of a face or the shape of a drop of liquid. We released the screen-printed poster of a mango to celebrate its visual beauty.

Click to purchase; only a limited number of prints are available.

Get in touch if you're interested in our stories, or just tell us how a story has moved you.