Kandy

Kandy began as Senkadagala, a settlement in a defensible river bend in the central hills, and rose in the late 15th century as the seat of an independent kingdom while the coasts fell to European powers. Its position made it almost unassailable: a ring of mountains, dense forest, narrow passes and malarial lowlands separated it from Colombo, and its rulers used the terrain rather than fortifications, abandoning the city when invaders came and returning when disease and supply lines broke them. Portuguese armies were destroyed in the passes more than once.

The kingdom became the guardian of the Tooth Relic, the object that legitimised Sinhalese kingship. Wherever the court moved the relic went with it, and the temple beside the palace was rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries into the complex seen today. The Kandyan kings played the Portuguese, Dutch and British against one another for three centuries, ceding coastal territory and trade while keeping the interior. The last dynasty, the Nayaks, came from South India and gradually lost the confidence of the Kandyan chiefs.

In 1815 those chiefs signed the Kandyan Convention, handing the kingdom to Britain and ending more than two thousand years of Sinhalese monarchy; a rebellion in 1817–18 was put down with severity. The British cut the road through Kadugannawa, brought the railway up in 1867, planted coffee and then tea across the hills, and made Kandy the administrative centre of the interior. Twentieth-century Kandy grew as a market, school and university city. The sacred city was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, and in 1998 a bomb badly damaged the front of the temple complex, which was rebuilt.

Kandy is the capital of Kandyan Sinhalese identity, which keeps customs distinct from the low country: a body of Kandyan customary law recognised in marriage and inheritance, the osariya style of draping the sari, and a particular formality of speech and manner. Kandyan dance, performed in beaded silver breastplates and elaborate headdresses to the double-headed geta bera drum, is a temple art turned into a national symbol, and is taught in schools and staged nightly in halls around the city.

The religious calendar runs on the Temple of the Tooth. Offerings with drumming and horns are made three times a day, and each full moon brings crowds in white. The Esala Perahera in July or August is the high point: ten nights of processions in which the four devales of the city join the temple, and the relic casket is carried through the streets on a tusker among hundreds of dancers, drummers and torch-bearers. The city has also been the seat of the two great monastic chapters, Malwatte and Asgiriya, since the 18th century.

Kandy is a school city as much as a temple one, with old institutions such as Trinity College and Dharmaraja shaping local loyalties, and the annual school cricket matches are major social events. There is a substantial Muslim population in the city and in towns such as Akurana, alongside Tamil and Christian communities; in 2018 anti-Muslim rioting in the district around Digana, east of the city, brought a ten-day state of emergency.

Something over a hundred thousand people live in the city itself, with several hundred thousand more in the surrounding urban district, and the daytime population is far higher: Kandy is the market, hospital, government and education centre for the whole of the central hills, and buses pour in from the villages each morning.

The economy is services, government and tourism rather than industry. The Temple of the Tooth and the botanic gardens draw visitors year round, hotels and guesthouses run up the hillsides, and gem and jewellery shops, craft workshops and tea sellers cluster in the centre. The University of Peradeniya, the teaching hospital and the schools employ many, and tea, rubber and spice estates surround the city. Remittances from relatives working abroad matter here as elsewhere.

The day begins early with temple drumming and the first commuter buses, and the centre is choked with traffic by mid-morning. Lunch is rice and curry, the offices close in the late afternoon, and in the evening families walk the lakeside path. The city's chronic problems are congestion in a valley with no room to widen roads, air pollution, housing costs on the limited flat land, and landslides after heavy rain. The cost of living since the 2022 economic crisis remains the dominant worry for most households.

Kandyan food is hill food: rice and curry built on vegetables grown nearby, with jak fruit, breadfruit, manioc, greens cooked as mallung, and dhal, all finished with coconut milk and served with pol sambol and papadam. Meat is less central than on the coast, and freshwater fish and dried fish from the sea substitute for it in many households. Kiribath, rice cooked in coconut milk and cut into diamonds, marks the first of the month, New Year and other auspicious days, eaten with a fiery lunu miris of onion, chilli and lime.

The city's signature snack is curd and treacle: thick buffalo curd set in a clay pot, eaten with kithul treacle tapped from the fishtail palm, sold at stalls on every road into the hills. Festival sweets are the Kandyan speciality — kavum, oil cakes of rice flour and treacle, kokis, crisp lattice fritters, aluwa, and coconut toffee — made in quantity for the April New Year.

Everyday eating in the centre runs on rice packets at lunchtime, hoppers and string hoppers in the evening, and kottu roti chopped noisily on hot plates at night. Muslim restaurants serve buriyani and watalappan, South Indian places near Peradeniya do thosai and vadai, and bakeries sell short eats all day. Tea is everywhere, drunk strong with milk and plenty of sugar, and the hills around the city are where much of it is grown.