By the sixteenth century Europe had come to Sri Lanka, and the coasts began to fall. Yet in the tangled green mountains at the island’s heart a single Sinhalese kingdom refused to yield. The Kingdom of Kandy would outlast the Portuguese, outlast the Dutch, and stand as the last independent home of a monarchy that reached back more than two thousand years. When it fell at last in 1815, an unbroken line of Sinhalese kings came to an end, and the whole island passed under a single foreign crown for the first time in its history.
A timeline of the Kandyan Kingdom
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1469 | Kandy declares independence from the kingdom of Kotte |
| 1594 | A Portuguese army is destroyed at Danture |
| 1638 | The Portuguese are crushed at Gannoruwa |
| 1640s | Kandy allies with the Dutch to expel the Portuguese |
| 1739 | The Nayak dynasty of South Indian origin takes the throne |
| 1803 | The first British invasion of Kandy ends in disaster |
| 1815 | Kandy falls; the Kandyan Convention deposes the last king |
| 1817–1818 | The Great Rebellion is crushed by the British |
A fortress of forests and hills
The secret of Kandy’s long survival was written into the land itself. The kingdom sat high in the central massif, a knot of steep ridges and deep valleys cloaked in rainforest and reached only by a handful of narrow, easily defended passes. Around this natural fortress the surviving Sinhalese royal line withdrew after the coastal kingdoms of Kotte and Jaffna fell to the Portuguese, and here, from about 1469, when a local prince declared Kandy independent of Kotte, it made its stand.
Kandyan strategy suited the country. Rather than meet European armies in open battle, the kings drew invaders deep into the hills, harassed their supply lines, and let the mountains, the monsoon and tropical disease do the fighting. Time and again the tactic worked. In 1594 a Portuguese expedition marching on Kandy was annihilated at Danture, and in 1638 another was destroyed at Gannoruwa, one of the heaviest defeats the Portuguese ever suffered in Asia. The coasts might be lost, but the highlands remained a world apart.
Playing off the Europeans
The kings of Kandy were also shrewd diplomats who learned to turn one European power against another. When the Portuguese pressed too hard, King Rajasinha II invited in the Dutch East India Company, signing a treaty in the 1630s and 40s under which the Dutch helped drive the Portuguese from the island in exchange for a monopoly on its cinnamon.
It was a bargain the Kandyans came to regret. The Dutch simply took the Portuguese place on the coast, ringing the kingdom with their forts and controlling its access to the sea and to salt. Kandy remained independent inland, but it was now hemmed in, and relations with the Dutch swung between uneasy peace and open war for the next century and a half. Through it all the kingdom held. When the British took over the Dutch possessions in 1796, they inherited both the coastal provinces and the old problem of the free kingdom in the hills.
The Temple of the Tooth and a courtly culture
At the spiritual centre of the kingdom stood the sacred tooth relic of the Buddha. For centuries Sinhalese tradition had held that whoever possessed the relic held the right to rule the island, so the kings of Kandy enshrined it in the Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, built beside their palace on the edge of the lake. It remains the holiest Buddhist site in Sri Lanka, and its guardianship gave the Kandyan monarchy a legitimacy that its enemies could never quite match.
Around the court flowered a distinctive highland culture that survives today. Kandyan dance, with its silver breastplates, spinning leaps and the deep thunder of the geta bera drum, was refined under royal patronage, as were the metalwork, ivory carving, lacquer and weaving now grouped together as Kandyan art. Every year this culture reaches its height in the Esala Perahera, the great procession in which elephants, dancers and drummers escort a casket of the relic through the streets by torchlight, a spectacle whose roots run straight back to the kings.
The fall of 1815
By the turn of the nineteenth century the kingdom was weakening from within. Its last kings belonged to the Nayak dynasty, a line of South Indian origin who had inherited the throne in 1739, and the final ruler, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, crowned in 1798, grew increasingly unpopular with his own Kandyan chiefs. His harshness, and a series of grisly executions, turned the aristocracy against him.
The British had already tried and failed to take Kandy by force; their invasion of 1803 ended in a massacre of the garrison. In 1815 they tried again, but this time the chiefs themselves opened the door. British troops entered the capital on 14 February 1815, and on 2 March the leading chiefs joined the governor Sir Robert Brownrigg in signing the Kandyan Convention. The king was deposed and shipped into exile in India, and the kingdom was ceded to the British Crown. Uniquely, Kandy was not conquered so much as handed over by its own nobles, on terms that promised to protect Buddhism and Kandyan custom.
The uprising and its aftermath
The peace did not last. British interference in the old order and broken promises soon soured the chiefs who had signed the Convention, and in 1817 the highlands rose in the Great Rebellion, also known as the Uva-Wellassa uprising. Its most famous figure, Keppetipola Disawe, was a chief sent by the British to crush the revolt who instead crossed over and led it; the rebels seized the Tooth Relic to proclaim the rightful cause.
Britain answered with a scorched-earth campaign of terrible severity, burning paddy fields, granaries and villages and destroying livestock across the rebel provinces, a devastation from which parts of the highlands took generations to recover. The rising was broken by 1818, and Keppetipola was captured and beheaded, remembered ever since as a national hero. In its wake the British dismantled the old kingdom’s autonomy for good. With the coasts and highlands now under one rule, the whole island was united for the first time under a single power, opening the era told in Colonial Sri Lanka.
Where to stand inside the kingdom today
The old royal capital still wraps around its lake and its temple, and the culture the kings patronised is very much alive. These are the places where a traveller can stand inside the last Sinhalese kingdom today.
- 1
Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic
The Sri Dalada Maligawa, holiest Buddhist shrine on the island, built beside the royal palace to house the Buddha's tooth. The octagonal Pattirippuwa pavilion facing the lake was added under the last king. Time a visit for a puja, when the drums call worshippers to the relic chamber.
- 2
Kandy Lake
The serene artificial lake at the heart of the city, dug in 1807 on the orders of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha in the final years of the kingdom. A wall of little cloud-shaped parapets, the 'walakulu bemma', still runs along its edge.
- 3
The Royal Palace complex
The surviving buildings of the kings' palace stand beside the temple, several now housing museums, among them the Royal Palace itself and the audience hall where the Kandyan Convention was signed in 1815.
- 4
The Esala Perahera
Sri Lanka's grandest festival, held each July or August, when a caparisoned tusker carries a replica of the Tooth Relic casket through Kandy amid torchbearers, whip-crackers, drummers and dancers over ten nights. Book accommodation far ahead.
- 5
A Kandyan dance performance
The vigorous, acrobatic dance the kings' courts refined, all silver headdresses, spinning and thundering geta bera drums, is staged nightly at cultural halls in the city and forms the climax of the perahera.
- 6
The National Museum of Kandy
Set in a former palace building, it gathers royal regalia, weapons, jewellery and everyday objects of the Kandyan court, giving a vivid sense of the kingdom's last centuries.
The kingdom is gone, but Kandy still feels like a capital. Pilgrims climb the temple steps as they have for centuries, drums roll across the lake at dusk, and the surrounding hills that once turned back armies now carry the tea country and the famous mountain railway. The Sacred City of Kandy is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and to walk its lakeside is to trace the last chapter of an independent Sinhalese kingdom. For where the story goes next, read on through Colonial Sri Lanka and Independence and modern Sri Lanka, or simply plan a visit to Kandy itself.