Sacred City of Kandy

Kandy was the last capital of the Sinhala kings, holding out until 1815, when the last king was captured and Kandyan chiefs signed the Kandyan Convention with the British at the Magul Maduwa, the Audience Hall. Its sacred and royal landscape centres on the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, with the palace precinct, devales, monasteries, lake and wooded hills forming a connected historic setting. UNESCO inscribed the Sacred City of Kandy on the World Heritage List in 1988, under criteria (iv) and (vi).

Tradition holds that the Tooth Relic was taken from the Buddha's funeral pyre at Kushinagar and brought to Sri Lanka in the 4th century CE, smuggled in inside Princess Hemamala's hair. It passed through Yapahuwa and Kurunegala before reaching Kandy in 1592. Vimaladharmasuriya I built the first two-storey shrine to house it around 1595; the stone temple complex standing today was largely built in the early 18th century under Sri Vira Parakrama Narendra Sinha. The last king, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, added the octagonal Paththirippuwa tower, designed by the royal architect Devendra Moolacharya, and had the lake — known locally as Kiri Muhuda, the Sea of Milk — dug in 1807.

Four devales dedicated to Natha, Vishnu, Kataragama and Pattini stand within the same precinct. The relic itself rests in a chamber called the Handun Kunama, in seven gem-studded gold caskets under a canopy added in 1987.