The History of Sri Lanka is usually taken to begin in the 6th century BC, when the Sinhalese people migrated into the island from India. Before the Sinhalese invasion the island was occupied by a people now known as Veddas,who are believed to be of Malay orgin. Some Vedda people still live in eastern Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese chronicle the Mahavamsa relates the landing of Vijaya, the first Sinhalese king, in 543 BC. The Sinhalese people are believed to have migrated from somewhere in northern India: they are not Dravidian like the peoples of neighbouring south India. The Sinhala language is related to Sanskrit, as is Hindi. The first Sri Lankan kingdom had its capital at Anuradhapura. In the third century BC the Sinhalese converted to Buddhism, and the island became a centre of Buddhist scholarship and missionary work. This set Sri Lanka apart from the Hindu culture of south India. Anuradhapura remained Sri Lanka's royal capital until the 8th century AD, when it was replaced by Polonnaruwa.Tamil people from India began to arrive in Sri Lanka as early as the 3rd century BC, and there were repeated wars between the Sinhalese and Indian invaders, and for much of the first millennium AD the island was controlled by various Tamil princes. The "golden age" of the Sri Lankan kingdom was in the 12th century, when the Sinhalese King Prakrama Bahu defeated the Tamils, united the whole island under his rule, and even invaded India and Burma. In the 15th century the island was attacked by China, and for 30 years the kings paid tribute to the Chinese emperor. Sri Lanka was known to the Greeks and to the Romans, who called it Taprobane. After the Arab conquest of the Middle East Arab traders frequently visited the island, and there has been an Arab community in Sri Lanka since the 10th century.The first Europeans to visit Sri Lanka in modern times were the Portuguese. The Portuguese founded Colombo in 1517 and gradually extended their control over the coastal areas. In 1592 the Sinhalese moved their capital to the inland city of Kandy, In 1602 the Dutch captain Joris Spilberg landed and the king at Kandy appealed to him for help in order to be released from Portuguese Rule.But it was not until 1638 that the Dutch attacked in earnest, and not until 1656 that Colombo fell. By 1660 the Dutch controlled the whole island except the kingdom of Kandy. A mixed Dutch-Sinhalese people known as Burghers are a legacy of Dutch rule. During the Napoleonic Wars the United Kingdom, fearing that French control of the Netherlands might deliver Sri Lanka to the French, occupied the island (which they called Ceylon) with little difficulty in 1796. In 1802 the island was formally ceded to Britain, and became a crown colony. In 1815 Kandy was occupied, finally ending Sri Lankan independence. A treaty in 1818 preserved the Kandyan monarchy as a British dependency. The British found that the uplands of Sri Lanka were very suited to tea, coffee and rubber cultivation, and by the mid 19th century Ceylon tea had become a staple of the British market, bringing great wealth to a small class of white tea planters.