The Portuguese arrived first, landing on the coast of what they called Kolonthota in the early 16th century. What began as a palisaded trading factory grew into a fortified harbor bristling with cannons - a foothold from which to control the island's interior and its cinnamon trade. The Sinhalese besieged the fort several times during the Sinhalese-Portuguese War, most notably in 1587, but the walls held. They did not hold against the Dutch East India Company, which took the fort in 1656 after intervening in the conflict. The Dutch tore down the Portuguese fortifications entirely and rebuilt from scratch, exploiting the natural defenses of lake and sea. The layout they imposed - the Fort district for administration, the Pettah (their 'Oude Stad') for residential quarters - still defines central Colombo. When the British acquired control, they kept the footprint but erased the ramparts between 1869 and 1871, replacing Dutch stone with Victorian architecture and military parade grounds.

Walk through Colombo's Fort today and you are tracing the outline of vanished ramparts without knowing it. The Delft Gate, once one of three entrances into the fortified enclosure, survives inside a commercial building on Bristol Street. The Battenburg Battery, a Dutch gun emplacement that covered the sea approach, still shows its wall lines inside the harbor area. A thick-walled warehouse called a Pakhuis - fortified to withstand naval bombardment - now houses the Colombo Maritime Museum. And within the naval base SLNS Parakrama, a section of rampart wall, the modest bastion Dan Briel, and a postern gate once called the Slave Port endure behind military fences. These fragments are easy to miss amid the traffic and tower blocks. But they are the physical evidence of a city that was, for three centuries, defined less by commerce than by the question of who held the guns.

The same ground has served as the seat of power for every regime that ever controlled Sri Lanka. The President's House traces its origins to the Dutch Governor's residence, later becoming Queen's House under the British, and finally the official residence of the President of Sri Lanka after 1972. The Neo-baroque Old Parliament Building now serves as the Presidential Secretariat. The General Treasury Building houses the Ministry of Finance; the Republic Building holds the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the Kandyan Convention of 1815, Colombo became capital of the entire island, and this district became its administrative heart. That began to change in the 1980s when Parliament moved to Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte, but the shift was never completed. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka, the old General Post Office, the Police Headquarters, and the Sri Lanka Navy command at SLNS Parakrama all remain here, tethered to the Fort by institutional gravity.

Fort became Colombo's financial district because of the harbor expansion that began in the 1870s. Where cannonballs once flew, capital now flows. The Bank of Ceylon, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and a constellation of local banks cluster along streets named for Dutch bastions and British royalty. The World Trade Centre of Colombo, one of the city's tallest structures, houses the Colombo Stock Exchange and the offices of corporations that drive Sri Lanka's economy. Along the foreshore, Galle Face Green - a promenade laid out in 1859 by Governor Henry George Ward - stretches south, offering kite-flyers and couples a sea breeze and a sunset view that no amount of commercial development has managed to obstruct. The Grand Oriental Hotel, once the finest address east of Suez, still stands near the harbor. So does St. Peter's Church, the Old Colombo Dutch Hospital, and the Sambodhi Chaithya - a Buddhist temple perched at the harbor's edge, its white dome a counterpoint to the glass and steel rising around it.