Kandy, Hill Country

British Garrison Cemetery

A quiet colonial burial ground where the average age at death was barely into adulthood, its 195 graves recording death by malaria, cholera, charging elephants, and one disgraced ‘traitor.’

⚮ 195 graves, 1817 to 1951 🕑 Restored 1998 👤 Grave of Sir John D’Oyly 📍 Behind the Temple of the Tooth

Walk through the British Garrison Cemetery and a pattern emerges quickly: most of the names belong to people who died astonishingly young, in their twenties or younger, victims of a tropical climate, wild animals, and diseases that colonial-era medicine had little defence against.

Quick Facts

Location	Behind the Temple of the Tooth, bordered by Udawattekele Sanctuary
Established	1817, shortly after the British took control of Kandy
Main burial period	1822 to 1873 (burials within municipal limits banned in 1873)
Last burial	1951, Annie Fritz, under special provision for relatives
Number of graves	195
Restored	1998, with funding from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

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A Resting Place for a Short-Lived Colonial Community

Established in 1817, just two years after the British takeover of Kandy, the Garrison Cemetery served as the main burial ground for the town’s British and European colonial community until a municipal ban on burials within town limits took effect in 1873. Special provision allowed relatives of those already interred to continue being buried there afterward, and the very last burial, of Annie Fritz, took place as late as 1951, closing out well over a century of use.

The 195 recorded graves paint a genuinely stark picture of colonial-era mortality. Tropical diseases, malaria and cholera especially, claimed the largest share of lives, and the average age at death recorded on the headstones sits astonishingly low, one visitor account noted an average of around 23 years, with only a handful of individuals surviving past 50. Writing before 1913, historian J.P. Lewis noted that the actual number of burials likely exceeded the number of graves still bearing legible inscriptions, meaning the true toll may be even higher than the visible headstones suggest.

Notable Graves

Sir John D’Oyly

The cemetery’s most historically significant grave belongs to Sir John D’Oyly, the British diplomat who drafted the 1815 Kandyan Convention, the very document that formally ended the Kandyan Kingdom. D’Oyly went on to become the first British commissioner administering Kandyan affairs, residing in the former royal palace, and was remembered for his scholarship in the Sinhala language. His grave, marked by a broken fluted masonry column with a marble tablet, remains one of the cemetery’s most prominent features.

Death by Elephant

John Spottiswood Robertson (1823 to 1856) holds the grim distinction of being the seventh and last European in Ceylon recorded as killed by a wild elephant, one of several similarly dramatic causes of death recorded here, alongside deaths from horse-riding accidents, lightning strikes, and collapsing houses.

A Disgraced ‘Traitor’

Among the more unusual stories associated with the cemetery is that of a British official remembered locally as a disgraced “traitor,” who reportedly had a musket at hand but failed to use it while thousands of Sinhalese attacked his building, a decision that cost him his community’s respect even though, as one visitor account notes, it may simply have been the choice any reasonable person facing overwhelming odds would make.

Visiting Tips

If available, ask the on-site caretaker for a guided walk-through; several visitor accounts describe caretakers who know detailed stories behind individual graves from memory.
Entry is typically by donation; visit before noon on weekdays for the best chance of finding the gates open.
Combine with the Temple of the Tooth, St Paul’s Church, and Udawattekele Sanctuary, all within easy walking distance.
The Kandy War Cemetery, a separate site near the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens holding WWII-era Commonwealth graves, offers a complementary stop for those interested in the region’s later colonial and wartime history.

A Quiet Counter-Narrative to Kandy’s Grand History

Most of Kandy’s major sights, the Temple of the Tooth, the devales, the National Museum, tell the story of Kandyan royal and religious life on a grand, ceremonial scale. The Garrison Cemetery tells a much smaller, more human story: the ordinary, often brief lives of the colonial administrators, soldiers and family members who found themselves stationed in a tropical hill town far from home, with limited medical care and unfamiliar hazards on every side. Reading name after name, age after age, most well under thirty, offers a sobering counterweight to the more triumphant historical narratives told elsewhere in the city, a reminder that colonial rule carried real personal cost even for those doing the colonising.