Sri Lanka’s last royal capital and its living cultural heart – a highland city set around an artificial lake and presided over by the Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, which has been the most important Buddhist site in the world for over fifteen centuries and continues to draw thousands of pilgrims daily who come to attend the three daily puja ceremonies that fill the temple complex with drumming, incense, and jasmine. Kandy is the point from which the Pekoe Trail begins, the city where Kandyan dance and ceremonial arts have been preserved through centuries of deliberate cultural resistance to colonial erasure, and the gateway to the tea country that begins in the highlands directly to the south.
