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, Along the hundreds of granite steps that climb toward Mihintale, mango trees still grow where they were iconised as witnesses to a historical philosophical exchange between a monk and a king.

You see the mango forest periphery along the stone stairways going up the now sacred rock—rooted in granite, branches reaching across the old sky, offering brief shade to pilgrims and wild monkeys alike. It does not announce itself; but the mango forest has always been here.

Mihintale is where King Devanampiyatissa met Arahat Mihindu—emissary of Emperor Ashoka, monk, teacher—and was asked to think, before he was asked to believe. The two men, at two extreme poles of secular and spiritual paths, met through an intellectual exchange.

According to Sri Lankan chronicles, it was in a mango grove on this very hill that Mihindu Thero posed a series of riddles to the king to assess his capacity for logic, reflection, and comprehension—the tools necessary to receive Buddhist philosophy. The King passed. The exchange marked the formal arrival of Buddhism on the island.

And the mango forest became a witness.

That mango forest is not remembered in marble or bronze, but the living forest itself. Its presence here was never ornamental. The trees bore fruit, gave shade, and anchored one of the most important philosophical encounters in Sri Lankan memory. And so they were left alone.

To this day, the mango forest of Mihintale remains.

Its canopies have sheltered centuries of thought. Its cycles of fruiting and falling have marked time outside the calendar. And in June, as pilgrims ascend those stairs for Poson Poya, it is not only the shrine they come to honour—but the path itself, lined by the forest that once overheard a new way of thinking take root.

The mango forest is still part of that rhythm. Quiet. Bearing witness. Offering stories to the ones who remember to look up.

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.