THE FORGOTTEN MASTER'S MASTERPEICE

To understand the master behind the masterpiece, we start 8,734 km from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel at Kensington Palace’s Presence Chamber. Here, where English monarchs received foreign ambassadors, is a fireplace of limewood carvings and cherubs by Grinling Gibbons.

No wood sculptor is the equal of this Michelangelo of woodcarving, who immortalised Restoration England and his patron, Charles II, with his “unequalled ability to transform solid, unyielding wood and stone into something truly ethereal.

None - except one practising at a similar time in the middle of Sri Lanka - Delmada Devendra Mulachari.

Mulachari is renowned for many things, but the rarest by far is Embekke Devale, a 16-mile drive from The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel. A medieval masterpiece, the temple has withstood wars, weather, and, most especially, the interminable conflict waged by the Portuguese and Dutch on the island’s last kingdom, in nearby Kandy.

By the 1750s, it was in a sorry state, its dilapidated walls noted by the rising young artist, Mulachari, who lived nearby; his family, one of several Singhala artists from the South, had come north to seek work.

Wood carver, sculptor, architect, artist, Mulachari worked for the last three kings of Kandy, and especially for King Kirthi Sri Rajasinha, whose 35-year reign, to 1782, was preoccupied with restoring the hundreds of Buddhist temples destroyed in the colonial wars. In this, the king was greatly helped by Mulachari, who built for him the Audience Hall and the Octagon in the Temple of the Tooth, and the Cloud Wall that surrounds its lake.

Travellers, whether local or foreign, with a temple in mind, head with unfailing sureness to The Temple of the Tooth, and not Embekke Devale. But although just fifteen kilometres apart, the two temples are worlds apart in artistry.

The Temple of the Tooth has a stolid, almost bourgeois respectability. By compassion, at Embekke Devale, you enter a magical world in which formality occupies but the smallest part.

In every section, in every place, are the surviving 500 statues of the great artist, each a masterpiece in itself. Exquisitely carved models of entwined swans and ropes, mothers breastfeeding children, double-headed eagles, soldiers, horses, wrestlers and elephants – all validate why this temple is famed across Asia for its world-class carvings.

But there is more. Fantasy intervenes. Erupting from a vein is a figure of a woman; a bird assumes human attributes; a sleight of hand reveals that an elephant is a bull; another, that a lion.