Kandy City

Kandy City

 

 Kandy, city in central Sri Lanka, capital of Central Province, on the Mahaweli River in the Kandy Plateau. It is one of the island nation's largest cities and the economic focus of the tea-producin central highlands. Dalada Maligava (the Temple of the Tooth), repository of a sacred Buddhist relic said to be a tooth of the  Lord Buddha, is here, and the University of Peradeniya (1942) is nearby. Dalada Maligava, together with other monuments of Buddhist architecture in the city, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.
The city has a beautiful artificial lake constructed in 1806 by the last king of Kandy, and the famous botanical gardens contains a superb collection of orchids. Kandy was the capital of a Sinhalese kingdom from 1592 to 1815, when it became one of the last sections of the island to be annexed by the British as part of colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).