The tooth relic now kept at Kandy has moved with political power for most of its recorded history, and once survived a truck bomb aimed directly at it.
Following the capital
Tradition holds the relic was smuggled out of India in the fourth century CE hidden in the hair of a princess, arriving in Sri Lanka to become a symbol closely tied to sovereignty there. As the island's ruling capital shifted over the centuries, from Anuradhapura to Polonnaruwa and eventually to Kandy, the relic and its housing temple moved with it, on the principle recorded in local chronicles that whoever held the tooth held the right to rule.
Attacked in 1998
On 25 January 1998, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam detonated a truck bomb at the temple's entrance during the country's civil war, killing several people and damaging the building's facade, though the relic chamber itself was not breached. The temple was restored, and the attack is generally read as a strike at national symbolism rather than at the relic's religious function specifically.
The procession that carries it, without showing it
The annual Esala Perahera, a multi-day festival of drummers, dancers and decorated elephants, parades a replica casket representing the relic through Kandy's streets each year; the actual relic itself is never displayed publicly, kept within a series of nested caskets that only a small number of custodians may access.