Sri Lanka's mountain capital — the Temple of the Sacred Tooth, the world's finest botanical garden, and rice and curry served on banana leaves
Kandy (population 125,000, Central Province) is the last royal capital of Sri Lanka — the seat of the Kandyan Kingdom from 1469 until the British conquest in 1815, and the city that guarded the island's independence against the Portuguese, Dutch, and British for nearly four centuries. The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic (Sri Dalada Maligawa) — which houses a tooth of the Buddha brought to Sri Lanka in the 4th century CE — is the most sacred Buddhist site in the country and the most visited monument on the island. The city sits around an artificial lake built by the last Kandyan king in 1807;…
The Kandyan Kingdom maintained Sri Lankan independence against three successive European colonial powers — the Portuguese (1505–1658) and Dutch (1658–1796) controlled the coastal lowlands but never broke Kandy's highland resistance. The British, after three wars (1803, 1815, 1818), finally conquered the kingdom in 1815 through a treaty with the Kandyan nobles who had overthrown their last king. The 1815 Kandyan Convention guaranteed the protection of Buddhism under British rule — a protection subsequently violated when the British transferred lands from Buddhist temples to the newly establish…