The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is an island country located southeast of India and northeast of the Maldives, with Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte serving as the administrative capital and Colombo serving as the commercial capital (and largest city). The island was home to several kingdoms before the arrival of Europeans; Portugal discovered the islandin 1505 and built a fortress at the port city of Colombo in 1517. The Portuguese gradually extended their control over the coastal areas, but they were evicted by the United Provinces in 1656 during the Dutch-Portuguese War. In 1796, Great Britain occupied Dutch Ceylon, fearing that the Netherlands' allies in the French Revolutionary Wars, the French Republic, could occupy the island for use in an invasion of British India. In 1815, the Kingdom of Kandy was conquered by the United Kingdom, ending Sri Lankan independence. The island was known as Ceylon until the end of British colonial rule in 1972, when Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike severed the island's ties to the UK, proclaimed the creation of a democratic socialist constitution, and renamed the nation to "Sri Lanka", meaning "Blessed Island". From 1983 to 2009, the island was torn apart by the Sri Lankan Civil War, which saw the predominantly-Sinhalese government fight against the rebellious Tamil Tigers separatists. In 2016, Sri Lanka had a population of 21,203,000 people.
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