Anuradhapura (Sri Maha Bodhi)

According to the Sri Lankan chronicle tradition, the emperor Ashoka sent a Buddhist mission to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE, traditionally led by his son, the monk Mahinda, who converted the reigning king, Devanampiya Tissa, at Mihintale near Anuradhapura. Ashoka's daughter, the nun Sanghamitta, is said to have followed with a cutting from the original Bodhi Tree at Bodh Gaya, the tree under which the Buddha attained awakening, and the sapling was planted at Anuradhapura with royal ceremony. The tree standing there today is maintained as a direct, unbroken descendant of that planting, tended continuously through more than two thousand years of the island's changing fortunes, which makes it, by the documentary record kept around it, the oldest known tree of human planting still growing at its original site anywhere in the world, a distinction of particular weight given that the original tree at Bodh Gaya itself has had to be replanted from cuttings more than once after damage and destruction over the centuries.

Devanampiya Tissa's conversion made Anuradhapura the capital of a Buddhist kingdom, and the Mahavihara monastery founded there became the center of the Theravada textual tradition that Sri Lanka would later transmit, in its Pali form, across mainland Southeast Asia. The city's skyline came to be dominated by enormous stupas, among them the Ruwanwelisaya, built under King Dutugemunu in the second century BCE and still, at nearly one hundred meters, one of the tallest ancient monuments in South Asia.

Anuradhapura remained Sri Lanka's political capital for close to fifteen hundred years, until repeated invasions from the south Indian Chola kingdom in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE forced its abandonment as a seat of government, and the island's rulers relocated first to Polonnaruwa and eventually further south. The city's great monuments were gradually reclaimed by jungle, and for centuries Anuradhapura survived chiefly as a monastic site tended by a resident community rather than as an inhabited capital, its stupas and reservoirs left to slow decay.

British era archaeology beginning in the nineteenth century, followed by sustained restoration after Sri Lankan independence, has since recovered and stabilized much of the ancient city, and the Sri Maha Bodhi itself was never abandoned, remaining an object of continuous veneration and care by resident monks even through the centuries when the surrounding city lay in ruin. The whole complex, known as the Sacred City of Anuradhapura, was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1982, and it functions today as both an active site of Buddhist pilgrimage, drawing worshippers to the Bodhi tree and the major stupas in continuous numbers, and as one of South Asia's most extensively excavated archaeological landscapes.