Today, as traffic crawls through Colombo’s concrete sprawl, it’s hard to imagine that giants once walked these same streets. For most of us, wild elephants belong to distant national parks, far from the city. But Colombo’s past tells a very different story.

For over 2,000 years, Sri Lankans lived alongside elephants—taming them, revering them, and weaving them into the very fabric of society. Ancient kings used elephants as symbols of power, engines of war, and tools of statecraft. As 17th-century observer Robert Knox recorded, they were even used as executioners.

Everything changed with the arrival of European powers. To the Portuguese and later the Dutch, the Sri Lankan elephant was a valuable commodity. A global trade emerged, and capture became industrialized. Traditional Sinhalese methods gave way to massive kraals: huge stockades designed to trap entire herds. Today, the locations of these kraals are the only clues we have to where elephants once roamed within and around Colombo.

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