Place · rock fortress · Sri Lanka
Yapahuwa
The 13th-century royal citadel at Yapahuwa in North Western Province, Sri Lanka — the brief capital of King Bhuvanekabahu I (ruled 1272-1284) after the Sinhalese royal retreat from Polonnaruwa under pressure from the Pandyan invasions. The monumental granite stairway (90 steps, carved with lion sentinels and relief panels) rises to the citadel's palace at the top of the 90-metre rock. The sacred Tooth Relic was kept here from 1272 until Pandyan forces captured it in 1284 and took it to the Pandyan capital of Madurai; the relic was recovered by Parakramabahu III and returned to Sri Lanka in 1309. The Yapahuwa Vihara at the base of the rock holds surviving 13th-century paintings. The site documents the political movement of Sri Lankan royalty away from the dry zone to the hill country interior.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Tradition
- Sri Lankan medieval history
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 7.815, 80.309
Connections (2)
- Monument relocationTemple of the Tooth, Kandy
The tooth relic legitimised whoever held it, so it moved as the capital retreated before invasion from south India — Anurādhapura, Polonnaruwa, Yāpahuwa, and finally Kandy. It was taken from Yāpahuwa to the Pāndya country and recovered by embassy, which is what a relic worth a kingdom is worth. The Esala Perahera that carries the relic through Kandy each year involves dozens of caparisoned elephants and several thousand dancers, and is the largest religious procession in the island.
- CampaignTambralinga / Nakhon Si Thammarat
Chandrabhanu of Tambralinga invaded Sri Lanka in 1247 and again in the 1260s and held part of the northern peninsula for a time, and it is against that pressure that the Sinhala court moved to the rock at Yapahuwa and built a fortified capital with the Tooth Relic in it. A Malay peninsular polity named on Rajendra's conquest list two centuries earlier was now mounting its own seaborne invasions of Sri Lanka; a Pandya force from the mainland eventually killed him.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Yapahuwa”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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