Who ruled Anuradhapura?

Anuradhapura stands on the Malwathu Oya in the dry north-central plain of Sri Lanka, some 205 kilometres north of Colombo. For roughly fourteen centuries it was the royal seat of the Sinhalese kings, and it became one of the great centres of Theravada Buddhism. Its huge brick stupas, monasteries and irrigation reservoirs now form a sacred city and World Heritage Site beside a modern provincial capital.

The Sinhalese chronicle known as the Mahavamsa, compiled around the fifth century CE, credits the first village on the site to Anuradha, a follower of the legendary prince Vijaya, and says that King Pandukabhaya later laid out a planned city there and made it his capital. The chronicle tradition gives dates in the late fifth or fourth century BCE, and different reckonings disagree. Excavations in the old citadel tell a longer story: people with iron tools, pottery, horses, cattle and rice were living there from about 900 BCE, and by 700 to 600 BCE the settlement covered at least 50 hectares. In the second century CE the geographer Ptolemy marked a place called Anourogrammoi on his map of the island, usually taken to be this city.

Under King Devanampiya Tissa, who reigned in the third century BCE, Buddhism reached the island through a mission linked by tradition to the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. The chronicles say the monk Mahinda converted the king and the nun Sanghamitta brought a cutting of the tree under which the Buddha gained enlightenment; planted in the royal gardens, it survives as the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi. Historians point out that no independent evidence confirms Ashoka had children of these names.

The Anuradhapura kingdom drew its wealth from rice farming fed by large reservoirs and canals, and the city became a seat of Buddhist learning where the commentator Buddhaghosa worked. Rulers from South India held it more than once. The Chola prince Elara governed the north for 44 years until Dutugemunu overthrew him in the second century BCE; the victor then raised the Ruwanwelisaya stupa and the Lovamahapaya. Five chiefs from South India ruled from about 103 to 89 BCE before Valagamba drove them out, and a line of six Pandyan rulers held power in the fifth century until Dhatusena recovered the throne. The tooth relic of the Buddha, a symbol of royal legitimacy, arrived in the fourth century. Of the long line of kings, only Kashyapa I moved his court elsewhere, to the rock fortress of Sigiriya.

A Pandyan army sacked the city in the ninth century. Then, in 993, the Chola emperor Rajaraja I invaded the north of the island while King Mahinda V, faced with a mutiny of his unpaid troops, fled south. Rajaraja's son Rajendra I completed the conquest around 1017 and carried Mahinda to India as a prisoner. A later Sinhalese chronicle says the capital was "utterly destroyed in every way by the Chola army". The Cholas governed from Polonnaruwa instead, and when Vijayabahu I restored Sinhalese rule he was crowned at Anuradhapura but kept his court at the more central Polonnaruwa. Vijayabahu IV restored some monuments in the thirteenth century, but the city never again served as the seat of government.

Pilgrims kept coming, and a small population remained among the overgrown ruins. The English sailor Robert Knox, writing in 1681, described a guard post there marking the edge of the Kandyan king's authority, and in 1821 the visitor John Davy called it "a small mean village, in the midst of a desert". Revival began under British rule in the 1870s, with archaeological survey and restoration, and the railway arrived in 1904.

In 1949 the government of Ceylon adopted a preservation plan that moved offices, courts and much of the population to a planned New Town to the east, leaving the ancient monuments in a protected sacred city. UNESCO inscribed the Sacred City of Anuradhapura on the World Heritage List in 1982. Today it is the capital of the North Central Province of Sri Lanka, the headquarters of the national archaeological survey, and one of the island's chief places of Buddhist pilgrimage.