Priceless ancient Sinhalese sculptures to England

Priceless ancient Sinhalese sculptures to England
Following is a gleaning [with the exception of images and labels] off the paragraph titled “Life in Colombo” in Pablo Neruda’ s [1904-1973] “Memoirs” ISBN 0 14 00 4661 5. Pablo Neruda, who went on to win Noble prize for Literature in the year 1971, was Consul of Chile in Ceylon [Sri Lanka] during 1928-1929. The preceding paragraph titled “Ceylon” begins: In 1929, Ceylon, the most beautiful of the world large islands…

 A garden doorstep at a home in Devon in the UK has been identified as a rare Sri Lankan artefact expected to fetch more than £30,000 ($47,500) at auction.

The auctioneer Bonhams says the carved granite step is a Sandakada Pahana - or moonstone - similar to those found in temples dating from Sri Lanka's Anuradhapura period (c400BC-1000AD). 22 January 2013  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21137743

Moonstone at Polonnaruwa vatadage, Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka

Life in Colombo

In Colombo there seemed to be no visible symptoms of revolution. Its political climate was different from India’s. Everything was engulfed by an oppressive calm. The country supplied England with the finest tea in the world.[1]
The country was split into sectors, or compartments. The English, who occupied the tip of the pyramid and lived in large residences with gardens, were followed by a middle class much like that in South American countries. They were and may still be called burghers [2] and were descendants of the former Boers, the Dutch settlers of South Africa exiled to Ceylon during the colonial war of the last century.

Below them was Buddhist and Moslem population of Ceylon, which numbered many millions. And still further down, making up the worst-paid working ranks, and also running into the millions, were the Indian immigrants, all from the southern part of India; they spoke Tamil and professed the Hindu religion.
In the so-called “polite society”, which paraded its finest clothes and jewels in Colombo’s exclusive clubs, two famous snobs competed for leadership. One was a phony French nobleman, Count de Mauny, who had a group of devotees. The other was an elegant and devil-may-care Pole, my friend Winzer, who dominated salons there were. This may was extremely witty, quite cynical, and a source of knowledge about everything in the world.

He had a strange profession-“preserver of the cultural and archeological treasures”- and going along with him one of his official expeditions was an eye-opening experience to me.
Excavations had brought to light two magnificent cities the jungle had swallowed up: Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. Pillars and corridors gleamed once again in brilliant Singhalese sun. Naturally, everything that could be shipped was carefully packed and went on its way to the British Museum in London.

My friend Wizer was pretty good at his work. He went to remote monasteries and, to the enormous satisfaction [3] of the Buddhist monks, he loaded the official van with marvelous stone sculptures, thousands of years old, that would end up in England’s museums. The look of contentment [4] on the faces of the saffron-garbed monks was something to see, when Winzer would leave them some painted-up celluloid Buddhist images, made in Japan, as replacements for their own antiques. They would look them over with reverent eyes [5] and set them up on the same altars from which the jasper and granite statues had smiled [5] for centuries.My fiend Winzer was an excellent product of the Empire; that is, an elegant short-change artist.

Footnotes by bunpeiris
[1] The Finest Black Tea in the World is produced in Sri Lanka: Ceylon Tea.
[2] Burghers in Sri Lanka are descendants of Portugusese [1505- 1640] & Dutch [1640-1796] invaders of Sri Lanka
[3], [4] & [5] Winzer would have hoodwinked Buddhist monks that the priceless sculptures would be returned to them once the exhibition in Colombo comes to its glorious end. There was no exhibition.

[5] Such is the craftsmanship of most of ancient Buddha statues, each of them seem to wear a veil of a smile. Children are quick to note the smile as bunpeiris has done decades ago at Sri Lanka Holidays Gal Vihara, Polonnaruwa.

In eternal love with Gal Vihara since the discovery of it at the early medieval lost city of Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka

Nearly a century and a half following the wild flight, the great escape from the natural fortress of Kandy surrounded by wooded hills and River Mahaweli Ganga (Sinhala: Great Sandy River), through Anuradhapura,"a world of hewn stone pillars" of Sri Lanka Holidays by British sailor Robert Knox Jr. (1641-1720) (An historical relation of the Island of Ceylon) in the year 1679, Lieutenant Mitchell Henry Fagan of the 2nd Ceylon Regiment, forcing his way through almost impenetrable undergrowth in the year 1820, encountered-face to face-a colossal statue gazing out at him from the foliage: Gal vihara. A colossal figure of Buddha cut from a granite wall was most serenely gazing at him from out of the foliage. "I cannot describe what I felt at that moment," he wrote.

"Neither could I when I first saw the great statues at the tender age of 8. It was like dream that you dream when just about to wake up. And you wake up with the dream & still on a cloud. But the upright Big Buddha most definitely smiled at me. Am I dreaming? No, Big Buddha smiled again." That's bunpeiris. There sprang up an eternal love on the spur of the moment: Gal Vihara was no longer a rock temple of rock carved statues. It is the heartthrob. If it was the flow of the sculptor's heart then, since then, it has been the stream that wash and cleanse the minds and the hearts of all those who stand in front of it. Stand, kneel or sit in front of the great statues. The sweeping serenity of the statues would breeze-open your heart and inflame it with eternal love.