This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 16 May 1880, Henry Steel Olcott, the American co-founder of the Theosophical Society, landed in Colombo, and three days later he and Helena Blavatsky formally took the Five Precepts at Wijayananda Viharaya in Galle, becoming Buddhists under the eyes of British colonial Ceylon.
Olcott did not begin the Sinhalese Buddhist revival himself, but he gave it institutions it had lacked after decades of Christian missionary schooling and colonial administration had pushed Buddhist education to the margins. His 1881 Buddhist Catechism, still used in Sri Lanka today, set out the faith in a form suited to a modern reading public, and the Theosophical Society built a run of Buddhist schools through the decade, Ananda College in 1886, Dharmaraja College in 1887, Maliyadeva College in 1888 and Mahinda College in 1892.
The young Sinhalese activist Anagarika Dharmapala, drawn into the movement through the Theosophical Society, carried the revival further still, founding the Maha Bodhi Society in Colombo in 1891 and turning its leadership toward an international campaign that reached the 1893 Chicago Parliament of Religions two years later. What began as two foreign converts taking Buddhist vows in a colonial port became, within little more than a decade, an organized movement with its own schools, its own catechism and a Sinhalese leader carrying Buddhism onto a world stage.