Abandonment and Return

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.