A black and white portrait photograph showing a stupa at a temple in Sri Lanka, framed by a palm tree.

A stupa is moud-shaped or hemispherical structure founded in many Buddhist temples across Asia. They often house sacred relics associated with Buddha or other venerated people. Sri Lankan stupas (also called dagaba) are often bell-shaped, including a dome and a conical spire.

This photograph is incorrectly captioned ‘COLOMBO WAR MEMORIAL’. Colombo’s Cenotaph War Memorial, built in 1923, is a very different structure (a stone column). Europeans often made errors when captioning photographs of Asian buildings, people, places and customs. The album compiler may have written this caption a long time after vising Sri Lanka.