Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / Secret Kandy Part 2 | God & Mammon
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- Secret Kandy Part 2 | God & Mammon The Vatican City of Sri Lanka, Kandy, is a place built on religion, money, politics, faith, power, morality - and some of the most striking temples anywhere in the world. But which ones should you visit? Kipling believed that to understand a country and its history, you had to smell it. Yet the past is documented in so many other ways - in books, in architecture, in music, or even in food. In Sri Lanka, it is the temples that best hold their story. Even so, their stories, like their secrets, are often hard to capture and even harder to comprehend. It is thought that there are well over 1,000 temples scattered across Kandy and its hinterland. Few are adequately documented and remain secrets to all but the people living next to them. Each one would once have held a pivotal position in its society, its influence spreading like a fishing net to encompass the administration, governance, and politics of its local culture, in ways now long lost. To see such places today, shorn of all this context, is like being told something intimate and confidential but having little wherewithal to interpret their mystery correctly. For the island’s temples are far more than just places of worship. If you can read them correctly, you will read the real record of the land. They are garrulous witnesses to its kings and wars, its festivals and customs, everything in fact that reflects the country’s life for over two thousand years. Many of the island’s most significant medieval and early modern temples lie in and around Kandy. And many of these were built or restored by Kirti Sri Rajasinha, the second Kandyan king of the Nayak Dynasty of Madurai, India, the third and final royal family. An especially passionate Buddhist devotee with a fondness for the religion’s more aristocratic expressions, he was responsible for reforms that did much to restore Buddhism, which had been badly damaged by the unrelenting forces of colonialism, especially those of the Dutch. Given Rajasinha's many other challenges, including fighting the Dutch and confronting serial internal rebellions, it is surprising that he was so successful in pursuing his religious priorities. To jump-start what was by then a most depleted Buddhist Sanga and to purge it of what he saw as practices inconsistent with the teachings of the Lord Buddha, he enlisted the help of Buddhist monks from Thailand. He backed the founding of what became the Siam Nikaya, which is now the largest of the two most prominent Buddhist chapters on the island. This most established of establishments is located at the Malwatu Maha Viharaya, a complex of temples and monasteries that was given the 14th-century pleasure gardens of the earliest Kandyan kings as its new address. Like the White House or Vatican, Malwatu Maha is a power magnet, fusing religion and politics into so particular a draw as to ensure that, should you ever have problems locating the President, essential ministers, notable visiting foreign dignities or ambitious politicians and celebrities, there is a more than certain chance that you are likely to find them queuing outside the doors of the chief prelate of the Chapter here. Barely five miles away from Malwatu Maha is another of Kirti Sri Rajasigha’s temples: the Galmaduwa, the loneliest temple in Kandy. Barely anyone goes there; indeed, it is not even a proper temple, its construction being abandoned by the king whose busy mind had moved from temple making to fresco painting. Yet it is an arresting building, the most Hindu of Buddhist shrines, with a high, tapering gateway, exactly like those used to mark the entrances to temples across Tamil Nadu. The frescoes that the king abandoned Galmaduwa Viharaya for can be seen a mile or so up the road at the Degaldoruwa Raja Maha Vihara. With hindsight, the king’s change of priority was bang on, for the frescos that cover the walls of this temple are among the very greatest ever commissioned by any of the island’s kings. Despite being inevitably religious in character, told with due piety, the story of Lord Buddha, with its subtext and sheer artistry, marks them out as exceptional. Into their scenes are incorporated images of their times – Portuguese firearms, for example, the uniformed attendants of the kings, processional elephants, fish, trees as stylised as coral, the interiors of homes, flowers, furniture, coaches, queens, guest arrivals, and dinner parties. On the opposite and western side of Kandy, there are several other incomparable temples – albeit ones whose daily visitor numbers can be recorded with the forlorn fingers of a single hand. The greatest by a whisker is the Lankatilaka Rajamaha, built around 1350 by the kings of Gampola, Versillian rulers known for their appreciation of the finer points of culture. As the Black Death ravaged faraway Europe, Sri Lanka’s late medieval kings enlisted the artistry of a Tamil architect famous for his Hindu temples to create a Buddhist edifice that merged the Sinhalese architecture of the Polonnaruwa period with Dravidian and Indo-Chinese flourishes. It could have been a car crash or a building; instead, Sthapati Rayar, the architect, pulled off a masterpiece. Elegant, highly incised white walls stretch into a roof of patterned tiles across three granite stories, the inside adorned with frescos. A few miles on is the Gadaladeniya Temple. Built around the same time as the Lankatilaka Rajamaha, by the same kings, to the design of another renowned Tamil architect, Ganes Varachari, this temple is, if anything, even more distinctive, its Vijayanagar architecture blending Dravidian, Deccan, Islamic, Hindu, and Rajput features with other, more common Singhala qualities. Remarkable though these temples are, there is another that is yet more heart-stopping for its sheer, naked beauty. It is best appreciated – at first at least – from afar. Very afar. From the Presence Chamber in London’s Kensington Palace, in fact. Here, where English monarchs received foreign ambassadors, is a fireplace adorned with limewood carvings and cherubs by Grinling Gibbons. No wood sculptor is the equal of this Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II, with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal. None - except one practising at a similar time in the middle of Sri Lanka - Delmada Devendra Mulachari. Mulachari is renowned for many things, but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale. A medieval masterpiece, the temple had withstood wars, weather, and, most especially, the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom, in nearby Kandy. By the 1750s, it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari, who lived nearby, his family, one of several Singhala artists from the South, having come north to seek work. Woodcarver, sculptor, architect, and artist, Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy, especially Rajasinha. In this, the king was greatly helped by Mulachari, who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake. Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. Although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry. The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By comparison, at Embekke Devale, you enter instead a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest of parts. In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a stroke of artistic genius in itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breastfeeding children, double-headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers, and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world-class carvings. But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a woman; a bird assumes human attributes; a sleight of hand reveals that an elephant is a bull; another, that it is a lion. "For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is," said Yoda in Star Wars. If measured simply by faith alone, nothing on the island, still less in Kandy, competes with The Temple of the Tooth, located in the centre of the city. Proof of its appeal is evident every year in the half million people who attend its 7-day Perehera, when the tooth is paraded through the town on the back of a large elephant. From Canada to Japan, several hundred million Buddhists watch the festival's televised coverage. And every 16 years or so, a still more popular festival occurs when the tooth is uncovered and shown to its worshippers. In 2025, the last recorded event, almost 2 million people attended – around 20% of the island’s entire population. With crowds such as these, it is no surprise that the city’s economy depends on religion in one way or another. “Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either,” remarked Mahatma Gandhi. Religion, money, politics, faith, power, and morality: in Kandy, they dance around the same stupa – as they have always done. Within the temple’s grounds are all the structures and buildings of the island’s last royal place as well. The whole complex merges one into the other, a confusion that makes clear the unremitting opacity of the line between religion and state has always existed in the country. To most Sri Lankans, the Temple is holier even than St Peter’s is to Catholics and at least as sacred as the Kaaba’s Black Stone is to Muslims. Even so, it is merely the latest temple to house the relic that makes it so important. The relic - said to be Lord Buddha’s left upper canine tooth - arrived on the island around 371 CE, hidden in the hair ornamentation of an Indian princess. Almost immediately, it became the island's most precious possession, legitimising the reign of kings and validating a priestly theocracy. Often on the move to escape war, capture, thieves, frenzied Catholics, rival warlords, or Tamil invaders, it lived in almost a dozen other temples in Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, and Dambadeniya, and in Yapahuwa, Gampola, Avissawella, and Kotte, before coming to rest in Kandy. As a relic, it has plenty of competition. Scores of alternative artefacts assert a connection to the Lord Buddha, including bowls, hairs, and bones. But the tooth is considered the most important because it touched the words he uttered in prayer. Across the world, thirty-two other places claim ownership of Buddha’s teeth. If all are credible, it would account for the teacher’s entire set of eight incisors, four canines, eight premolars, and twelve molars. But somehow, by dint of custom, history, worship, faith and record, the tooth now in Kandy is by far the most celebrated one. And as for the tale that the original tooth was pounded to dust by the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa in a fit of excessive evangelical catholic excitement: well, no one really believes that. The relic’s continuing importance is evident in the fact that a victorious President or Prime Minister’s first call upon winning an election here is to the Temple of the Tooth. There, like hundreds of thousands of devotees, the winning leader receives a monkish blessing. For much of its existence, the temple has also been a target, destroyed by both the Portuguese and the Dutch; by weather, war, and insurrection; and the temple you visit today is in its fourth or fifth edition (depending on your definition of restoration). The building, designed in classic, gracious Kandyan style, has double-peaked tiled roofs underpinned by a panoply of pure gold and is surrounded by a golden fence. Elaborate frescoes adorn its walls. The chamber is richly decorated with elephants, guardian stones, and moonstones restored after LTTE bomb blasts. Seven caskets studded with gems and shaped like stupas fit one into another, the last holding the relic itself. Rituals are performed three times daily: at dawn, noon, and dusk. Once a week, the tooth is symbolically bathed in water scented with herbs and flowers. And once a year, it is paraded around the city streets in a vast Perehera procession of elephants, priests, fire eaters, dancers, and acrobats. The palace that surrounds the temple is a poignant shadow of its old self, the British having destroyed half of its buildings. Even so, the ones that remain are outstanding examples of the zen-like elegance of patrician hill country architecture, with wooden pillars, decorative carvings, distinctly pitched roofs, and walls and windows that open out interior spaces with such artful restraint as to give the resulting light a unique and calming luminosity. This is most evident in the Royal Audience Hall, the Magul Maduwa, a wooden structure built by King Sri Vikrama Rajasinha in 1783. Much good it did him - for here it was, in 1815, that the Kandyan Convention was signed, brutally ending the island’s last kingdom. Unhappily, many of the palace’s buildings have become squats for lucky civil servants, their unbending bureaucratic domicile, twitching with room partitions, plastic furniture, and rusty fans, distorting most of the original architectural features that once made these buildings so exquisite. The stunningly graceful Ulpange, built in 1806 by King Sri Wickrama Rajasinha as a bathing pavilion for queens, now serves as a police post. The Wadahindina Mandappe Audience Palace is home to the stuffed remains of Rajah, the chief elephant in the Kandy Perahera, who died in 1988, prompting a full day of national mourning. The Pattirippuwa, an immeasurably stylish octagonal pavilion, has been commandeered by a library. The King’s Palace, the Raja Wasala, is a Museum. The Queens' Chambers, the Meda Wasala, with its fetching courtyard and veranda, has been commandeered by the Department of Archaeology, and wild horses are not likely to drive them out. But at least the Maha Maluwa, the boundless terrace adjacent to Kandy Lake, has not been encroaching upon, and at one end bears a stone memorial beneath which is buried the skull of Keppetipola Disawe, who led the failed rebellion against the British in 1818. In the oddest set of circumstances, his skull, following his execution, found its way to the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh. It took 136 years before it was returned to the city of his death to lie now beneath this monument overlooking the lake. High official, landowner, aristocrat, patriot, and freedom fighter: Keppetipola’s life and death also show that he was the hero he is considered to be today. But if Keppetipola Disawe is the island’s most obvious state hero, the country’s folk hero is undoubtedly Sura Saradiel, a bandit and a gang leader from the nineteenth century. Dubbed Sri Lanka’s Robin Hood, Saradiel was hanged by the British on 7 May 1864 in Bogambara Prison, Kandy, along with his childhood friend, Mammale Marikkar - the last two people to be publicly executed. To the British, Saradiel was little more than a gangster, though today his exceptional good looks would have won him modelling and TV contracts aplenty. Dacoit though he may have been, but his penchant for redistributing some of his stolen items amongst poor villagers won him, and wins him still, many fans. One of these has made him a love song in concrete, and he is recreating it in Saradiel Village. Located near his mother’s village and a few miles from Kandy on the Colombo road, this little fantasy hamlet is peopled with tableaus from the past: craftsmen and cooks, the hero’s family, farmers, a gypsy snake charmer, a coffee shop, toddy drinkers in a tavern, an astrologer’s house, workshops for carpenters and goldsmiths. It is perhaps no mere coincidence that two such famous rebels should have come from around Kandy. The British annexation of the kingdom in 1815 failed to seal the deal. Keppetipola was no lone wolf. His leadership of the 1817 Uwa-Wellassa Uprising, also known as the Great Liberation War, gained the support of numerous other Kandyan chiefs. For a moment, British control was almost broken. The shattering scorched-earth policy pursued by the British colonial government after the war was responsible for thousands of deaths and the economic destitution of vast areas of the hill country. But things did not end there. Just 30 years later, in Matale, just up the road from Kandy, a second massive uprising broke out as poor farmers objected to the sweeping land reforms that were dispossessing them. Once again, British control over the country hung in the balance. Kandy, and the hill country’s guardianship of Singhala independence, may have been defeated – but it was not dead. It merely hid, waiting for the chance to break free. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbirck at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.