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True Valor
The fleet is at sea and Anuradhapura has fallen, and he orders somebody to go and count the fields.
In the year 1000 he had the land measured.
Not conquered, measured. Surveyed, recorded, divided into new administrative units called valanadus, and written down.
For a king who had spent fifteen years taking territory by force, it is the more revealing act of the two.
And it is the reason the Chola state outlasted him by three hundred years.
Most conquests of that scale outlast their conqueror by about a decade.
Rajaraja was born Arulmoli Varman on the 3rd of November, 947, a son of Sundara Chola.
He did not come straight to the throne. Uttama Chola reigned first, and Arulmoli became king only on Uttama's death in 985, a delay that has kept historians interested ever since.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.