Sri Lanka Trivia
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58 free Sri Lanka trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sri Lanka has been called Taprobane, Serendib and Ceylon, and this quiz covers the whole island: the 3,000-year written record that starts with a prince from Bengal, the Bodhi tree planted in 245 BCE that is still alive, the rock fortress of Sigiriya, the Portuguese, Dutch and British, the coffee blight that turned the country to tea, independence in 1948, the world's first elected female prime minister and the civil war that ended in 2009. Easy questions ask for the old name, the capital, the neighbour across the Palk Strait and the sport everyone follows; the harder ones want the legislative capital's full name, the mountain with the sacred footprint, the king who built 1,470 reservoirs, the Arab name that gave English the word 'serendipity', the year Ceylon became a republic and the man who took 800 Test wickets. There is also the lion flag, Ceylon cinnamon, hoppers and kottu, Kandyan dance, the Esala Perahera and the tsunami of 2004. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its history, its landmarks and its people, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Sri Lanka lies just off the southern tip of which country?
India
India. The limestone shoals of Adam's Bridge almost join the two countries, and records suggest people could cross on foot until a storm breached it in 1480.
Q 02Which city is Sri Lanka's executive and judicial capital, and its largest city?
Colombo
Colombo. It grew up around a harbour that is largely man-made, built out in the colonial era, and that port still handles most of the country's foreign trade.
Q 03Sri Lanka's parliament sits in which city, its legislative capital?
Kotte
Kotte, in full Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte. Parliament moved there in 1982, into a Geoffrey Bawa building set on an island in a lake, on the site of a 15th-century royal capital.
Q 04Which strait separates Sri Lanka from the subcontinent to its north-west?
Palk
The Palk Strait is so shallow and reef-strewn that large ships cannot use it and have to sail the long way around Sri Lanka instead.
Q 05From 1948 to 1972, Sri Lanka held which status under the British monarch?
Dominion
Dominion. Like Canada and New Zealand, Ceylon governed itself but kept the Crown, represented by a governor-general, until the 1972 constitution made it a republic and renamed it Sri Lanka.
Q 06Which classic epic was filmed in the jungles of Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon?
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Bridge on the River Kwai. David Lean shot it on Sri Lanka's Kelani river, where his crew built a replica of the wartime bridge and then blew it up on camera.
Q 07Sirimavo Bandaranaike made history in 1960 as the world's first what?
Elected female prime minister
Elected female prime minister. Her party drafted her as leader after her husband, the prime minister, was assassinated in 1959, and it won the July 1960 election decisively.
Q 08Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009, was fought against which separatist group?
The Tamil Tigers
The Tamil Tigers grew from a guerrilla band into a force with its own navy and a handful of light aircraft, which bombed targets around the capital in 2007.
Q 09Sri Lanka's Moors, the country's third-largest ethnic group, mostly follow which religion?
Islam
Islam. The Moors are commonly traced to Arab spice traders who settled on the coasts over a thousand years ago and married locally, and most now speak Tamil.
Q 10Which language does Sri Lanka's constitution name as the 'link language' between Sinhala and Tamil speakers?
English
English. It was the language of government until a 1956 law made Sinhala the only official language; Tamil gained equal status in 1987, with English kept as the link between the two.
Q 11With no tigers on the island, which big cat is Sri Lanka's only one and its top predator?
Leopard
Leopard. With no larger rival to compete with, the Sri Lankan leopard is the island's only big cat and its top predator, which may be why it has grown into one of the larger leopard subspecies.
Q 12Sri Lanka's chronicles name Mahinda, the monk who brought their faith to the island, as the son of which emperor?
Ashoka
Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor, sent his own son and daughter as missionaries, and Mahinda is said to have converted King Devanampiya Tissa on the hill of Mihintale.
Q 13Which ancient Sri Lankan capital shelters a sacred fig said to have been planted there about 2,300 years ago?
Anuradhapura
Q 21Which city at Sri Lanka's northern tip is home to the Nallur Kandaswamy temple?
Jaffna
Jaffna. Its public library was burned down in 1981 with more than 97,000 books and manuscripts inside, and was later rebuilt.
Q 22Before tea, which crop was Sri Lanka's main export until a blight wiped it out in the 1870s and 80s?
Coffee
Coffee. A rust fungus destroyed the once-flourishing plantations within a couple of decades, and the planters replanted the same hillsides with tea.
Q 23Which Glasgow grocer bought tea estates in Ceylon in 1890 and sold their crop under his own name?
Thomas Lipton
Thomas Lipton. He sold the tea cheaply in packets under the slogan 'Direct from the tea gardens to the teapot'; the island's first tea estate had been planted in 1867 by fellow Scot James Taylor.
Anuradhapura. Tradition says the fig grew from a cutting carried across the sea in the 3rd century BCE, and the city around it stayed the island's capital for more than a thousand years.
Q 14Sigiriya, the 5th-century 'Fortress in the Sky', was built by which king?
Kashyapa I
Kashyapa I, who reigned 477-495 after seizing the throne from his father Dhatusena, built his palace on the summit of the 180-metre rock; only the foundations survive.
Q 15The name Sigiriya means what?
Lion Rock
Lion Rock. Visitors once reached the summit through the open mouth of a gigantic lion built of brick and plaster; the head has collapsed, and only its paws still flank the staircase.
Q 16Which king, ruling 1153-1186, united Sri Lanka under one rule and built vast irrigation reservoirs?
Parakramabahu I
Parakramabahu I, called the Great, united the island under one rule and then carried war overseas, sending expeditions as far as Burma.
Q 17Which old Arab and Persian name for Sri Lanka is the root of a word meaning 'happy accident'?
Serendib
Serendib was the Arab and Persian name for the island; Horace Walpole coined 'serendipity' in 1754 from the fairy tale 'The Three Princes of Serendip', whose heroes kept making lucky discoveries.
Q 18In which order did the three European colonial powers control parts of Sri Lanka?
Portuguese, Dutch, British
Portuguese, Dutch, British. An inland king invited the Dutch in to help drive out the Portuguese and got a new coloniser instead, and Britain seized the Dutch forts in 1796.
Q 19Which inland city was the last independent Sinhalese kingdom, falling to the British in 1815?
Kandy
Kandy kept its independence in the hills through more than two centuries of European rule on the coasts, until its own chiefs signed the kingdom over in 1815 and the last king was deposed.
Q 20Sri Lanka's Temple of the Tooth houses a relic said to be a tooth of whom?
The Buddha
The Buddha. Kings kept the tooth close to their palaces because whoever held the relic was believed to hold the right to rule the island.
Q 24Most cinnamon sold worldwide is actually which related spice, rather than Sri Lankan 'true cinnamon'?
Cassia
Cassia. It carries far more coumarin than true cinnamon, a compound that can harm the liver, and testing for it is one way laboratories tell the two barks apart.
Q 25What appears in each of the four corners of Sri Lanka's flag?
A bo leaf
A bo leaf, from the sacred fig, sits in each corner as a symbol of the majority faith, while the two vertical stripes beside them stand for the island's two largest minorities.
Q 26Sri Lanka's highest mountain, Pidurutalagala, rises above which hill station built up by British colonists?
Nuwara Eliya
Nuwara Eliya. At nearly 1,900 metres it is the coolest town on the island, so the British turned it into a hill station where they could escape the lowland heat.
Q 27The rock formation at the summit of Adam's Peak, sacred to four religions, resembles what?
A footprint
A footprint. Each faith claims the hollow for its own figure: Hindus say the god Shiva left it, Muslim and Christian traditions point to Adam or St Thomas, and pilgrims of every faith climb to it each year.
Q 28What is Sri Lanka's longest river?
The Mahaweli
The Mahaweli rises in the wet hill country and flows all year, so its dams and channels carry water to farmland across the island's dry zone.
Q 29Sri Lanka beat which team in the 1996 Cricket World Cup final?
Australia
Australia. They had refused to travel to Sri Lanka for their group match after a bombing and forfeited the points, then lost the final to the same team by seven wickets.
Q 30Which Sri Lankan spinner was the first bowler to take 800 Test wickets?
Muttiah Muralitharan
Muttiah Muralitharan needed eight wickets from his farewell Test in July 2010 and took the eighth, his 800th, with the last ball he ever bowled in Test cricket.