Temple of the Tooth, Kandy: What to See, When to Go and How the Puja Works

The Sri Dalada Maligawa holds what Sri Lankan Buddhists believe is a tooth of the Buddha, and that single object explains most of Kandy's history. Possession of the relic was tied to the right to rule the island, which is why it moved with the court from Anuradhapura to Polonnaruwa and eventually here in the sixteenth century, and why the Portuguese claimed to have destroyed it and Sri Lankans maintain they did not. When the British took Kandy in 1815 they had to sign a convention guaranteeing the protection of Buddhism, largely because the relic was in the building.

What this means for a visitor is that the temple is not a monument. It is a working religious site with a daily schedule, and the difference between seeing it and experiencing it comes down entirely to timing. Turn up at two in the afternoon and you will walk through a beautiful, quiet complex of painted ceilings and carved wood. Turn up at 6.30pm and you will be in a crowd of several hundred people, with drummers and horn players in the corridor and a moving queue past an open chamber.

The relic itself is never displayed. It sits inside a gold casket, which sits inside six more caskets, and what you see during a puja is the outermost one, from a distance of several metres, for a few seconds as the queue moves. Visitors who arrive expecting to see a tooth leave disappointed; visitors who come for the ritual around it usually rate it the best hour they spend in Sri Lanka.

The relic chamber on the upper floor opens three times a day, and it is closed the rest of the time. The pujas run at 5.30am, 9.30am and 6.30pm, each lasting roughly an hour, and each accompanied by hevisi drumming in the corridor outside.

The evening puja at 6.30pm is the one most visitors choose and the one with the strongest atmosphere: the building is lit, the courtyard is full, the drumming carries through the complex, and the queue past the chamber is long. It is also the most crowded, and on a poya day it can take 45 minutes to move through.

The 5.30am puja is the opposite and is worth the alarm if you are willing. There are far fewer visitors, the people around you are almost entirely there to worship, and the light through the eastern windows at that hour is remarkable. The 9.30am puja sits between the two and is the practical compromise if you are fitting the temple into a day tour.

Outside these windows the upper chamber is shut and you are visiting the building rather than the ritual, which is still worthwhile but a different experience. Arrive 20 to 30 minutes before a puja starts to get through security and find a position.

The complex is larger than the famous facade suggests. The octagonal Pattirippuwa, the tower you see in every photograph, was built in 1802 and originally used by the king to address crowds; it now holds a library of palm-leaf manuscripts. Beyond it are the main shrine, the drummers' courtyard, and an upper floor where the relic chamber sits behind a carved doorway.

The Alut Maligawa, a newer hall in the same compound, contains rows of donated Buddha statues from Buddhist countries around the world and a museum covering the relic's history. It also holds a permanent exhibit on the 1998 bombing of the temple by the LTTE, which killed sixteen people and damaged the facade; the restoration work is visible if you know where to look.

The Raja Tusker Museum in the same grounds is a small and genuinely odd thing: the preserved body of Raja, the tusker who carried the relic casket in the Perahera procession for around fifty years and was declared a national treasure. Sri Lankans visit it with real feeling.

The ceilings and the woodwork are the part people underrate. Kandyan craftsmanship is at its best here — painted panels, ivory inlay, and lacquered columns — and a guide is worth having simply to be told what the recurring motifs mean.

Shoulders and knees must be covered, for men as well as women. Sarongs are rented at stalls outside the entrance for a small fee if you arrive unprepared, which many people do. Shoes come off before you enter the temple grounds proper and are left at a shoe deposit for a token charge; hats come off too.

Bring socks. The courtyard and interior floors are stone, and by mid-afternoon they are hot enough to be genuinely painful barefoot. This is the single piece of advice most guides omit and every visitor wishes they had heard.

Security is real rather than performative: bags are searched, and there is a checkpoint on the approach. Large bags are best left at your hotel. Photography is allowed in most of the complex but not of the relic chamber during the puja, and posing with your back to a Buddha image for a photograph is a serious offence in Sri Lanka, not a quirk — tourists have been deported for it.

Entry for foreign visitors is around LKR 2,000-2,500 and is paid in cash at the ticket office. Sri Lankan nationals enter free, which is why the queue you join may not be the one you first see.

Every full moon, or poya, is a public holiday in Sri Lanka and a major day at the temple. The complex fills with white-clad worshippers carrying lotus flowers, the atmosphere is at its best, and the queues are at their worst. If you want to see the temple at its most alive, aim for a poya. If you want to see it comfortably, avoid one.

The Esala Perahera in July or August is the temple's own festival and one of the great processions in Asia — ten nights of drummers, dancers, fire-twirlers and caparisoned elephants carrying a replica of the relic casket through the city. The dates move every year because they are set by the lunar calendar, so a guide that tells you it happens in a fixed week is guessing. Check the current year's dates before planning around it.

During the Perahera, Kandy is full in a way it is not at any other time. Hotel rates multiply, rooms on the procession route are booked a year ahead, and the roads close in the evenings. It is worth attending and it is not worth arriving unprepared for.

The temple sits at the northern end of Kandy lake, in the centre of town, and almost everything else worth seeing is within a few minutes of it. A sensible day puts the Bahirawakanda Buddha on the hill in the morning for the view, the Peradeniya botanic gardens in the middle of the day when the heat is worst and the shade is best, and the temple in the evening for the 6.30pm puja.

If you are day-tripping from Colombo, be realistic: it is three to four hours each way, and most day trips reach the temple in the early afternoon, between pujas. If the ritual is the reason you are coming, stay a night in Kandy instead. It costs one hotel night and changes the whole visit.

A guided city day is worth it here more than in most Sri Lankan towns, because the individual sites are short and the connections between them are the interesting part. The Kandyan kingdom held out against three European powers for three centuries, and the layout of the town — the lake, the temple, the hills closing it in — is the reason why.