Kandy

The hill kingdom

Kandy, known as Senkadagala in early records, became a royal seat in the later fifteenth century, when a branch of the Kotte royal family established itself in the central highlands. As the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, took over the coastal lowlands, the highland kingdom became the main independent Sinhalese state, protected by forests, mountains and difficult passes.

Vimaladharmasuriya I (r. 1590–1604) made Kandy his capital and brought the Tooth Relic of the Buddha there. The relic had been the palladium of Sinhalese kingship for centuries, and possession of it was seen as a mark of the right to rule. Rajasinha II (r. 1635–1687) allied with the Dutch to drive the Portuguese from the island in the 1640s and 1650s, only to find the Dutch occupying the coast in their place. The Englishman Robert Knox, held captive in the kingdom from 1660 to 1679, wrote an account of it that was widely read in Europe.

The Temple of the Tooth stands within the old palace complex beside the lake. The present buildings date mostly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the octagonal pavilion, the Pattirippuwa, added by the last king. The relic itself is kept in a series of nested gold caskets in an inner chamber and is not shown; the caskets are carried in procession at the Perahera. Daily rituals of offering are performed by monks of the two chief monasteries of the city, Malwatta and Asgiriya.

The Nayaka kings

In 1739 the last king of the Sinhalese line died without a direct heir, and the throne passed to his queen's brother, from the Nayaka family of Madurai. The four Nayaka kings were Hindu by origin but patrons of Buddhism. Kirti Sri Rajasinha (r. 1747–1782) invited monks from Siam in 1753 to restore the higher ordination, which had lapsed, founding the Siam Nikaya, which remains the largest monastic order in Sri Lanka. The great annual procession of the Tooth Relic, the Esala Perahera, took its modern form in his reign.

The British conquest

The British took the Dutch possessions in Sri Lanka in 1796. Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the last king, was in conflict with his own chiefs, and in 1815 a British force entered Kandy with the support of leading Kandyan nobles. The king was captured and deported to Vellore in south India, where he died in 1832. Under the Kandyan Convention of March 1815 the chiefs accepted British sovereignty, and the British promised to protect Buddhism. A great rebellion in 1817–18 was suppressed with much destruction.

The lake at the centre of the city was created by the last king in the early nineteenth century. In January 1998 a truck bomb attack attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam damaged the Temple of the Tooth, which was restored. Kandy remains the religious centre of Sinhalese Buddhism, and the Perahera each July or August draws very large crowds.