The tooth at Kandy has been a political instrument for most of its recorded history, and the buildings around it were designed for that.
The claim
The tooth is said to have been recovered from the Buddha's cremation and brought to Sri Lanka in the fourth century, hidden in the hair of a princess of Kalinga.
What matters historically is not the provenance but the doctrine that grew around it: whoever holds the tooth holds the right to rule the island.
What follows from that
The consequence is architectural and geographic. Sinhalese kings built their relic temples beside their palaces, and moved the tooth whenever they moved their capital: Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambadeniya, Yapahuwa, Kotte, and finally Kandy.
The relic's itinerary is therefore a map of Sri Lankan political history. Rivals and invaders sought it for the same reason, and the Portuguese claimed to have captured and destroyed it in the sixteenth century, a claim Sri Lankan tradition rejects, holding that what was destroyed was a replica.
The present building is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work, inside the old royal palace compound.
What is actually seen
The relic is not displayed. Visitors see a gilded casket, itself containing a series of nested caskets, and even that is opened only on rare occasions.
Worship is conducted three times daily by monks of the Malwathu and Asgiri chapters, and a lay official, the Diyawadana Nilame, administers the temple, a division of monastic and lay authority that reflects the relic's dual religious and political character.
Once a year the Esala Perahera carries a replica casket through Kandy on an elephant, over ten nights, with dancers, drummers, whip-crackers and torchbearers.
1998
On 25 January 1998 three LTTE attackers drove a truck carrying several hundred kilograms of explosives into the entrance and detonated it. Seventeen people were killed, including the attackers.
The facade, the roof and the moonstone were badly damaged. The inner chambers and the relic were not.
The date was chosen: it was the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Sri Lanka banned the LTTE for the first time the following day, the attack on the tooth achieving what years of other attacks had not. Restoration took about eighteen months.
The episode confirmed the premise the whole site rests on. An attack on the relic was understood, by everyone involved, as an attack on the legitimacy of the state.