The Royal Palace and National Museum of Kandy

The Royal Palace of Kandy was never a single grand building. It was a compound of pavilions, courtyards and store-houses that grew over two centuries beside the temple. Fires, wars with the Portuguese and Dutch, and British rebuilding removed much of it, and what remains is a handful of long, whitewashed halls with heavy tiled roofs.

The surviving palace buildings in Kandy are scattered around the temple precinct, which is why visitors miss them. Some lie inside the ticketed temple area and others open onto the public lane behind it. A plan at the temple entrance shows the layout, and a guide can link them into a coherent hour.

The Magul Maduwa, or Audience Hall, is the most important secular building in Kandy. It is an open timber pavilion on a stone platform, with a steep roof carried on rows of carved wooden columns. Here the king heard petitions, received ambassadors and sat in judgement with his chiefs.

The Audience Hall of Kandy is where Sinhalese independence formally ended. On 2 March 1815 the Kandyan chiefs and the British governor's representatives signed the Kandyan Convention in this hall, deposing Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe and ceding the kingdom to the British Crown. The hall was lengthened in the 1870s for a royal visit and is still used for state ceremonies.

The King's Palace of Kandy, the Raja Wasala, stands at the northern end of the compound. Its long facade, central doorway and inner courtyard date largely from the reign of the last kings. After 1815 it became the residence of the senior British official in the hill country.

The archaeological museum inside the King's Palace is small and often quiet. It displays timber pillars, stone carvings, pottery and architectural fragments from Kandyan-period buildings across the central hills. The rooms themselves, with their thick walls and deep verandas, are as interesting as the exhibits.

The National Museum of Kandy occupies the Palle Vahala, the building where the king's queens and their attendants lived. It opened as a museum in 1942. The collection of several thousand objects covers the Kandyan period, roughly the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The exhibits in the National Museum of Kandy show how the court and the craftsmen of the kingdom lived. Look for the royal regalia and jewellery, lacquer work, ola-leaf manuscripts, weapons and a copy of the 1815 Convention. Labels are brief, so a little reading beforehand helps.

The Raja Tusker hall, inside the temple grounds, is a memorial to the most famous elephant in Sri Lankan history. Raja carried the golden casket in the final Randoli procession of the Esala Perahera for around half a century. He was declared a national treasure in 1986 and died in 1988.

The preserved body of Raja stands in the centre of the hall, surrounded by photographs of his years in the Perahera. Some visitors find the display moving and others find it uncomfortable. Either way, it says a great deal about the place of the temple tuskers in Kandyan life.

Visiting the Royal Palace of Kandy takes a little planning because the buildings have different keepers. The Audience Hall and Raja Tusker hall fall within the temple precinct. The National Museum sells its own ticket, usually for the equivalent of a few US dollars, and closes on certain days of the week and on public holidays.

The best order for the royal quarter of Kandy is temple first, then the Audience Hall, the museum and the British Garrison Cemetery behind it. Lankan Stays & Trails builds this into a single guided morning or late afternoon, ending at the evening puja. Dress as for the temple throughout.