Long before the Europeans came, the island now called Sri Lanka was home to one of Asia’s great early civilisations. Its kings built cities of a scale that still astonishes, raised brick domes taller than anything else in the ancient world save the pyramids, and engineered water on a level unmatched anywhere for over a thousand years. Two capitals stand at the heart of the story: Anuradhapura, the ancient, and Polonnaruwa, the medieval. Together they form the spine of Sri Lanka’s history and the finest reason to venture into the dry-zone plains.
A timeline of the ancient kingdoms
| Period | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 4th century BC | Anuradhapura is founded and becomes the Sinhalese capital |
| 3rd century BC | Mahinda brings Buddhism; the sacred Bodhi tree is planted |
| 2nd century BC | King Dutugemunu builds the Ruwanwelisaya dagoba |
| 1st century BC | Cave shrines founded at Dambulla under King Valagamba |
| 5th century AD | King Kasyapa builds the rock palace at Sigiriya |
| c. 993 AD | Chola invaders sack Anuradhapura; the capital is abandoned |
| 11th–13th century | Polonnaruwa flourishes as the new royal capital |
| c. 1153–1186 | Parakramabahu I’s golden age and great irrigation works |
Anuradhapura: the city of thirteen centuries
The story begins around the 4th century BC, when Anuradhapura rose on the northern plains and became the seat of the Sinhalese kings. It would hold that role for roughly 1,300 years, an extraordinary span that makes it one of the longest-lived capitals in human history. The city grew rich on rice and trade, and its kings poured that wealth into religion and public works.
The turning point came in the 3rd century BC, when the monk Mahinda, a son of the Indian emperor Ashoka, is said to have met King Devanampiyatissa at the hill of Mihintale and converted him to Buddhism. From that moment Anuradhapura became a holy city, and the arrival of Buddhism shaped everything that followed. Soon afterwards the king’s sister-in-faith, the nun Sanghamitta, arrived carrying a sapling of the very tree at Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha had attained enlightenment. Planted at Anuradhapura, that tree, the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, still grows today, tended without a break for more than two thousand years and often called the oldest historically documented planted tree on earth.
Around the sacred tree the kings raised the dagobas, or stupas, that still dominate the skyline: solid domes of brick built to enshrine relics of the Buddha. King Dutugemunu completed the gleaming white Ruwanwelisaya in the 2nd century BC, its base ringed by a wall of sculpted elephants. Later came the vast Jetavanaramaya and Abhayagiri, brick monuments so tall that in their day only the pyramids of Giza surpassed them. Between the great shrines lay monasteries for thousands of monks, refectories, hospitals, carved moonstones and cool stone bathing pools, the physical remains of a Buddhist civilisation at its confident height.
Anuradhapura’s long day finally ended around 993 AD, when armies of the powerful Chola empire of southern India swept in, sacked the city and annexed the island. The old capital, its irrigation works ruined and its monasteries emptied, was abandoned to the jungle. When Sinhalese kings recovered their independence, they built afresh a little to the south-east.
Polonnaruwa: the medieval golden age
That new capital was Polonnaruwa, which flourished from the 11th to the 13th century. More compact and more easily defended than Anuradhapura, it enjoyed a brilliant if shorter life, and its ruins are in many ways better preserved. The city reached its zenith under Parakramabahu I, who reigned from about 1153 to 1186 and remains one of the most revered figures in Sri Lankan history.
Parakramabahu reunited a divided island, championed Buddhism and left behind some of its greatest art. Chief among the treasures is the Gal Vihara, where four monumental images of the Buddha, seated in meditation, standing, and reclining at the moment of passing into nirvana, were carved from a single face of grey granite. The serene expressions and the flowing lines of the robes are held up as the summit of ancient Sinhalese sculpture, and the reclining figure, some fourteen metres long, is among the most beloved images in the country.
The great hydraulic civilisation
Yet the deepest achievement of these kingdoms was not their shrines but their mastery of water. The dry-zone plains receive most of their rain in a short monsoon and little for the rest of the year, so survival depended on catching and storing every drop. From early in Anuradhapura’s history the Sinhalese built tanks, great artificial reservoirs, linked by canals and fed through remarkably precise low-gradient channels and sophisticated sluice valves that let engineers draw water off under controlled pressure. Historians call the result a hydraulic civilisation, and few societies anywhere managed anything comparable for well over a millennium.
Parakramabahu carried the tradition to its climax. He is credited with building or restoring more than 160 major tanks and thousands of canals, and his masterwork was the Parakrama Samudra, the “Sea of Parakrama”, a reservoir of more than twenty square kilometres formed by joining earlier tanks and damming the Amban Ganga. His guiding principle, recorded in the old chronicles, has echoed down the centuries: that not even a little water should flow into the sea without first serving the people. It is an ethic of stewardship that feels strikingly modern, and the tank still waters the fields and cools the ruins of Polonnaruwa today.
Where to walk among the kingdoms today
The kingdoms are not lost cities of legend but living monuments spread across the dry-zone plains, most of them within a day's reach of one another in what Sri Lanka calls its Cultural Triangle.
- 1
Anuradhapura
The first capital, a vast sacred landscape of giant white dagobas, monastery ruins, bathing pools and the revered Sri Maha Bodhi tree. Best explored slowly by bicycle. A UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- 2
Polonnaruwa
The compact medieval capital, its palaces, temples and the sublime Gal Vihara Buddhas ringed by the shimmering Parakrama Samudra reservoir. The most rewarding half-day of ruins in the country. UNESCO-listed.
- 3
Sigiriya
The 5th-century rock fortress of King Kasyapa, crowned by a palace and reached past ancient frescoes and a giant carved lion's paws. The island's most famous climb and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- 4
Mihintale
The hilltop near Anuradhapura where Buddhism is said to have come to the island. A stairway of over a thousand steps climbs past dagobas and rock ledges to a serene summit and a white seated Buddha.
- 5
Dambulla
The Golden Temple, a series of five cave shrines set into a rock face, their ceilings and walls covered in murals and crowded with more than 150 Buddha statues. UNESCO-listed and easily combined with Sigiriya.
The kingdoms’ long legacy
Polonnaruwa faded in its turn during the 13th century, as invasions, silting tanks and shifting power drove the Sinhalese kingdoms steadily south and west toward the wetter hills and, eventually, Kandy. The great cities slipped back into forest, their dagobas swallowed by trees until British-era surveyors and archaeologists began to clear and record them in the 19th century.
What survives is far more than a set of picturesque ruins. The Buddhism that Mahinda is said to have carried up Mihintale remains the faith of most Sri Lankans; the sacred Bodhi tree is still an object of daily pilgrimage; and the philosophy of the tanks lives on in a countryside still checkered with ancient reservoirs. To stand beneath the Ruwanwelisaya at dawn, or before the reclining Buddha of the Gal Vihara, is to meet a civilisation that flourished for the better part of two thousand years. From here the island’s story moves on through the Kandyan kingdom and the colonial centuries, but the plains of the north-central dry zone remain, for many travellers, the very heart of Sri Lanka.