Jaffna residents have long considered their city to be one of Asia’s finest intellectual capitals, and this library is an important Tamil cultural center and historic institution. Inaugurated in 1841, it was burnt down by pro-government mobs in July 1981 – few acts were more significant in the build-up to civil war. Tellingly, it was one of the first major buildings to be rebuilt after the 2002 ceasefire. In its reconstruction architects kept true to the elegant original neo-Mughal design from 1959.
The original world-renowned collection destroyed in the fire included more than 90,000 volumes, including irreplaceable Tamil documents such as the one surviving copy of Yalpanam Vaipavama, a history of Jaffna.