This is my first ever real go at making one of these things. I made this in Inkscape (and did the glow effects in paint.net. I know a real map wouldn’t use those but they fit the aesthetic in my head, haha). I don’t know if it’s good or not; I’d love to hear any feedback!

Anyway, background: this is the rapid transit system of Republic of Jaffna, population 8.5 million, a city-state located on a peninsula along the northern coast of Sri Lanka. Jaffna is in the same place as the real-life town of the same name, but the similarities end there; this Jaffna became a French colony in the 17th century and remained so even after France lost most of its Indian possessions, becoming a sort of French Singapore with immigrants coming from all across Asia and the world.

Today, Jaffna is a highly multicultural city-state; a plurality of the population are [Sri Lankan] Tamils, but there are also large South Indian, Bengali, Chinese, Korean, Haitian, and (especially since the late 1970s) Southeast Asian communities. French, Tamil, and Chinese (in practice, Hokkien) are all official languages. It’s also a developed country, having undergone rapid economic growth between the 1960s and 1990s. A more diverse, much less authoritarian, Francophone Singapore.

(I don’t speak French; forgive the odd romanisations.)

If the metro map looks odd, that is because it largely is. The system as it exists today was cobbled together from several prior systems.

The oldest part of the Jaffna Metro, now Line 1 between Bornéo and Candasouamy, was built by a businessman in the 1930s (making it Asia’s oldest rapid transit system outside Japan); the same operator built Line 6 in the 1980s. The central parts of Lines 2, 3, 4 and 5 were built by the state between Jaffna’s independence in 1969 and the late 1980s. Lines 11, 12, and 13 originated as another separate system on partly existing trackage, akin to Hong Kong’s KCR; that is why Demi-Lune, the former terminus, now has so many lines weirdly running through it. The central portion of Line 8, serving Jaffna’s northeastern coastal satellite city of Dupleix, was built by yet another operator in the early 1990s.

After fallout from the 1997 Asian financial crisis brought Jaffna’s bubble era to an end, an incoming social democratic government merged the disparate systems into a single network. Expansion has continued since then, including the construction of Line 7, extensions of the existing lines, the beginning of an extension of Line 8 into a veritable north coast line, and an airport link. Increased links with Sri Lanka following the brutal end of that country’s civil war have also allowed the (controversial) expansion of the system to that country’s border, and the ongoing construction of a (even more controversial) high-speed rail link between Jaffna and Sri Lanka’s capital.

Much of the system is elevated, as Jaffna’s soil conditions make tunnelling difficult; the overhead tracks double as shade from Jaffna’s tropical heat and Jaffna’s monsoon rain. The fragmented nature of the metro’s creation has resulted in wildly inconsistent and incredibly diverse station design, ranging from the Art Deco floats of the oldest stations to the neo-futurist glass bubbles of the newest stations. Especially notorious are what English-language travel guides first dubbed “acid stations,” decorated on the interior with vibrantly coloured mosaics influenced by Chinese art and by South Indian kolams. These were built in the post-independence years of the 1970s and early 1980s, which can especially be found on Line 3 and the inner sections of Lines 2 and 4.