Sri Lanka has had a string of identities and has been known under a range of nicknames and pseudonyms. To Prince Vijaya and the founders it was Tambapanni, after the copper-coloured beach on which they landed. In the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, a sea captain working for Annius Plocamus, a tax collector, in the Red Sea, was caught in a monsoon that swept his boat off course and dumped him on the island 15 days later. For him Tambapanni was too much of a mouthful and became Taprobane. The geographer Ptolemy made a slight change, showing it on his 2nd-century AD map as Taprobanam.Arab traders could have told Annius Ploca-muss captain that if he waited a while a differ�ent monsoon would blow him back to Arabia, or if he liked, East Africa. They relied on these winds to go back and forth, knew the island well and called it Serendib, a corruption of a Sanskrit word Sinhaladvipa. But the 1 Sth-century English novelist, Horace Walpole, stuck to the Arabic for his fairy-tale. The Three Princes of Serendib, and used it to coin the word serendipity, mean�ing discovery by happy accident.It was the Portuguese captain, Edward Barbosa, visiting in 1515, who arrived at the name Celao, acorruption of the Chinese Si-Lcm, which to Euro�peans became Seylan. The Dutch settled for Zeilan, the English compromise was Ceylon. But the Sinhalese, who had lived on the island for many hundreds of years, always preferred Lanka, and it officially changed to Sri Lanka in 1972 (the prefix means holy or beautiful.