The Sacred Tooth Relic of Kandy, known in Sinhala as the Sri Dalada, is a tooth venerated by Theravada Buddhists as a relic of Gautama Buddha and kept in the Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, in the hill city of Kandy, Sri Lanka. The relic is never displayed directly; it rests within a bell-shaped gold reliquary, the karandua, itself the innermost of seven nested caskets of diminishing size, each richly worked in gold and set with gems.
For the greater part of Sri Lankan history the tooth was more than a devotional object: it was the palladium of the Sinhalese monarchy, and the king who held it was held to hold the legitimate right to rule the island. That political charge kept the relic moving with the royal capital across the centuries and made its custody a matter of statecraft as much as of religion.
Today the temple is the ceremonial heart of Sri Lankan Buddhism, part of the Sacred City of Kandy inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988, and the relic is the focus of the great annual Esala Perahera, in which a replica casket is borne through Kandy on a caparisoned elephant amid dancers, drummers and torchbearers.