The island left an indelible mark on Chekhov. Before he left, he started writing a famous story, Gusev, which describes the death of a soldier during a sea voyage, Charles Haviland from BBC said.

The story was reputedly much admired by the great Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

When Chekhov completed it he inscribed it with the dateline: "Nov 24th, 1890, Colombo".

In November 1890 Chekhov sailed into Colombo on a long voyage back from the prison island of Sakhalin in the Russian Far East.

"Then there was Ceylon - the place where Paradise was located. Here, in Paradise, I covered more than 100 miles by railway," he wrote.

In early December this year, on the initiative of the Russian ambassador, the Galle Face - one of the two famous colonial-era hotels in the capital, Colombo - inaugurated a plaque commemorating the writer. A sculpture of Chekhov was installed in the other hotel, the Grand Oriental.

The new plaque at the Galle Face hotel was made by a Russian sculptor, Gennadi Provotorov, and brought to Sri Lanka by a Russian parliamentary delegation.

"He saw tropical nature for the first time," Russian professor and Chekhov biographer Dmitry Kapustin said. "He met very friendly people. He fell in love with a local woman and wrote [about it] in his letter."

More surprisingly, he brought three mongoose from Ceylon to Russia.

"They lived in his house for several years. And at last he decided to gift them to Moscow Zoo," said Prof Kapustin.

Chekhov spent just three days and two nights in Ceylon. A recently discovered hotel bill shows that he stayed his second night in the hill town of Kandy.

His first may have been spent at either of the Colombo hotels; it seems he visited both as he mentioned them in letters.

"It's true we were a British colony, but I think Russian literature has surpassed even English literature," said S Karunatillake, who runs the Russian Literary Circle in Colombo.

"Chekhov's short stories about Ward No. 6 and The Woman with the Dog are very popular in Sri Lanka, they are very close to our hearts."

Some of his works have been translated into Sinhala and Tamil and the renowned Sri Lankan writer, Martin Wickramasinghe, has written about Chekhov's visit to Ceylon, BBC said.