Polonnaruwa

Chola Polonnaruwa

For more than a thousand years the capital of the Sinhalese kings had been Anuradhapura. Around the end of the tenth century the Chola king Rajaraja I invaded northern Sri Lanka, and his son Rajendra completed the conquest. The Cholas made Polonnaruwa, further south-east and better protected from the north, their seat, calling it Jananathamangalam. Chola Hindu temples survive there, including the small stone temple of Shiva known as Shiva Devale No. 2, one of the oldest buildings in the city.

The Sinhalese capital

Vijayabahu I drove out the Cholas in 1070 and kept Polonnaruwa as his capital. After a period of division, Parakramabahu I (r. 1153–1186) reunified the island and made the city a showpiece. He built a great reservoir, the Parakrama Samudra, "sea of Parakrama", by joining older tanks; a large palace complex; and Buddhist monuments. He also reformed the monastic order, bringing the rival fraternities together under the Mahavihara tradition, a reform recorded in his inscriptions and in the chronicle. The chronicle also credits him with expeditions to Burma and south India.

The Gal Vihara, a group of four Buddha images cut into a granite outcrop, belongs to his reign. Its standing figure, about seven metres high, with crossed arms, and its reclining figure, over fourteen metres long, are among the finest sculptures of Sri Lanka. The Vatadage, a circular relic house with stone guardstones and moonstones, and the Lankatilaka, a great brick image house, belong to the same period. The Rankoth Vehera and the Kiri Vehera are large stupas, and the Tivanka image house preserves wall paintings of the Jataka stories, the most important group of the Polonnaruwa period. A large stone figure of a bearded man holding a manuscript, at the Potgul Vehera on the edge of the reservoir, is popularly identified as Parakramabahu himself, though some scholars see it as a sage or teacher.

His successor Nissanka Malla (r. 1187–1196), a prince from Kalinga, built lavishly and left many boastful inscriptions, among them the Galpota, a stone slab more than eight metres long.

Abandonment

After Nissanka Malla the kingdom was troubled by rival claimants from south India. In 1215 an invader known as Kalinga Magha seized Polonnaruwa, and the chronicle describes his rule as a time of persecution and destruction. The Sinhalese capital moved to the south-west, to Dambadeniya and later to other centres, and the dry-zone irrigation system that had supported both Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa was gradually abandoned. Polonnaruwa was overgrown until the ruins were cleared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was listed by UNESCO in 1982.