ALL THINGS KANDY

The island’s cultural capital – and home to its last kings

Despite its weighty pull and reputation as the island’s second city, Kandy is actually smaller in population than Jaffna and Negombo and only a little larger than either Trincomalee, Kalmunai or Galle.

Nor is it, relatively speaking, especially old, post-dating many other island cities with foundations dating to 1357–1374 AD. It did not gain its first king until 1473. Today, they have long since been replaced by traffic that might snap the patience of an entombed pharaoh, facilities and shops that frustrate even moderate demands, and a city plan that makes a bowl of spaghetti look ordered.

Even so, to nearly every Sri Lankan, Kandy is second only to Colombo, and in terms of culture and history, far more important. Undoubtedly, the presence in the city of the sacred Tooth Relic has something to do with this. As has been the fact that the town Kingdom was the last Kingdom left standing when the colonists arrived in earnest, for it was from Kandy that the island’s resistance to foreign invaders was meted out mainly.

Sitting more or less in the middle of the island, a gateway to the Central Highlands, rail and road lines reach up to it from all sides. At 1,526 feet above sea level, its climate is cooler and wetter than that of much of the country, making it a much more comfortable place to live.

Centred snugly within a rolling landscape of hills, it has a vast artificial lake in its centre, built in 1807 by King Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, and on its western side, the Royal Peradeniya Gardens, Asia’s finest botanical garden.

Kandy Lake offers the welcome prospect of a bracing walk. Known as the Sea of Milk, the lake is surrounded by a dramatic Cloud Wall across much of its three-kilometre circumference and is overhung by giant rain trees. Across its eighteen-metre depth lurk whistling ducks and monitor lizards, turtles, cormorants, egrets, pelicans, eagles, owls, herons, and numerous fish, including an exotic and savage 9-foot-long alligator Gar – a fish with a crocodilian head, a broad snout, and razor-sharp teeth.

A circuit of the lake starting at The Temple Of The Tooth itself takes you all the way round to the Temple’s back entrance, where lies the entrance to the British Garrison Cemetery, created in 1817 - two years after the formal annexation of Kandy. It is home to almost two hundred souls, laid out like crazy paving, including John Robertson, the last European to be killed by a wild elephant in Ceylon; William Robert Lyte, grandson of the author of "Abide with Me;” and the colonial ruler, Sir John D’Oyly whose penchant for sarongs and beards made him the country’s first foreign hippie.

A visiting Englishman wrote that “a stranger visiting this spot would be charmed at the magnificent scenery which surrounds it. In this lonely spot lie many hundreds of kindly Scots, who cut off in the very prime and vigour of their manhood, sleep the sleep which knows no waking, under the rank weeds and wiry grasses which cover their neglected graves. Many a sad tale of hardship, agony, and pain, could the tenants of these nameless graves tell, were they permitted to speak.”

Despite Buddhism, the city nevertheless has a stunning mosque and kovil, as well as many churches and monasteries. It boasts over 20 prominent colleges and the island’s best university – the University of Peradeniya, plus several hospitals, the better ones to the west in Peradeniya.

Down its roads lurk an entire street of lawyers; another of fabric shops; and still another of hardware stores. In between are showrooms for white goods, gemstones, computers, mobiles, and shoes. There are a few good bookshops, and a market that throbs with vendors promising the earth for little cash. And in the middle of it all rises Kandy City Centre, a fortress of a shopping mall, with escalators and air conditioning.

Home to the famous Temple of the Tooth and a capacious lake, Kandy offers ample retail therapy, beauty salons, theatres for traditional dance and much more. Its crop of weary hotels, such as the Suisse and the Queen’s, is slowly being refreshed by a range of lovelier hotels that offer a safe refuge for visitors in need of recovering from the more dystopian aspects of city planning. But if these elude you, head for Slightly Chilled, a marvellous bar overlooking the lake, with snacks and food to fill between beer and cocktails.

Or the Royal Bar & Hotel, an old walawwa that dishes out welcome bowls of chips and frosted glasses of lime juice. The building is typical of many that haunt the city’s tiny, crowded streets, betraying, with hints of bashful sorrow, the remaining traces of striking 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century vernacular architecture.

Balconies and verandas, screened windows and opaque courtyards hide behind shop hoardings that have yet to be bettered anywhere on the island for their chronic ugliness. Even so, to the discerning eye, beauty is there to be glimpsed; there to remind you that all is not yet lost, architecturally.

The Kataragama Devalaya, a Hindu shrine built by an 18th-century Buddhist king, is a perfect example of just such a surviving treasure – its architecture enlivened by the most intricate carvings, and its colours chosen to banish grey forever.

Still more dazzling is the nearby Pillaiyar Kovil, a Hindu temple dedicated to Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Siva, and built by a Buddhist king for his Tamil Dobhi. To meet the establishment, head for the Malwatu Maha Viharaya, the Ground Zero of Buddhist authority.

This complex of temples and monasteries dates to the 14th-century pleasure gardens of the earliest Kandyan kings. It is the home of the Siam Nikaya, the largest of the two most prominent Buddhist chapters on the island, and the one so memorably supported by one of the last kings of Kandy, Kirti Sri Rajasinha.