Medawala Tampita Rajamaha Viharaya

A raised Tampita image house on twenty stone pillars, about 1.5 km from Medawala town on the Kandy-Doranegama road, and some 19 km from Kandy by way of Peradeniya and Weligalla. Sixteen carved wooden posts support the shrine above, with a narrow circumambulatory path in petal-tile pattern behind a turned-wood railing. Inside, a marble Buddha in Bhumisparsha Mudra sits beneath a Makara Torana, and the Kandyan-period wall paintings cover the Sath Sathiya, the sixteen Solosmasthana sites, and Jataka tales — alongside King Kirti Sri Rajasinghe and the royal family, a farmer ploughing with a white bull, and a recumbent Buddha shown under a mosquito net.

The Medawala Sannasa, a copper plate the king issued on 7 December 1755, records his endowment to the temple: eleven lines on one face, ten on the other, on a plate 0.6 metres long and weighing 0.38 kilograms. It is treated as a primary source for Sinhalese temple architecture and art across the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries, and provides firm evidence for the temple's eighteenth-century history.

Tradition traces an earlier temple here to King Vattagamani Abhaya, built during his time in Malaya Rata in the first century BC — a founding story, not an archaeological one. The site is also said to have been destroyed by Portuguese forces in the early sixteenth century and rebuilt under Kirti Sri Rajasinghe, with the Tampita shrine dated to that reconstruction. The Department of Archaeology restored the temple in 1959, and in 2009 a gazette notification placed the Tampita Viharaya, the Pohoya Geya, a slab inscription, a rock inscription, a Wahalkada, a dagoba, and the Buddha statue in the newer image house under formal protection.