Sri Dalada Maligawa

Sri Dalada Maligawa began as the royal chapel of the Kandyan kingdom, built specifically to keep the tooth relic beside the seat of royal power in the tradition, shared across much of Buddhist Southeast and South Asia, that possession of such a relic legitimises a ruler's authority. The present buildings date substantially from the eighteenth century, when Kandyan kings rebuilt and expanded the complex after earlier structures suffered damage in the kingdom's long wars, first against the Portuguese and Dutch and later the British, who finally annexed Kandy in 1815, ending the island's last independent kingdom.

The temple's administration reflects this royal origin even after the monarchy's end: a lay chief custodian, the Diyawadana Nilame, a position with roots in the royal court's own administrative offices, still oversees the temple's affairs today alongside the monks of the Malwatte and Asgiriya chapters, and the Sri Lankan state, rather than any surviving royal family, now provides the governmental oversight a kingdom's crown once did. The relic survived the kingdom's fall from a symbol of royal legitimacy into one of national and religious identity for the Sinhalese Buddhist majority.

The temple's modern history includes a serious act of violence: in January 1998, during Sri Lanka's civil war, a truck bomb attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam exploded at the temple's entrance, killing several people and severely damaging the building's facade and roof, an attack widely understood as targeting the relic's symbolic importance to the Sinhalese Buddhist state rather than any purely military objective. The relic itself, kept deep within the building's nested chambers, survived undamaged, and the temple was subsequently restored.

The tooth's authenticity, like other tooth relics claimed elsewhere in this atlas, most notably at Lingguang Temple in Beijing, has never been settled by independent physical examination, since the relic is not removed from its sequence of caskets for scientific study and is displayed to the public, when displayed at all, only briefly and from a distance. Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition treats the relic's documented arrival in the fourth century CE and its unbroken royal custody since as sufficient grounds for its veneration, a position of faith rather than one resting on forensic verification, and the temple's own presentation reflects that position rather than claiming scientific proof it has not sought.