Built under King Dutugemunu in the second century BCE and among the most venerated stupas in the Theravada world.
The dome stands about 55 metres and the whole structure rests on a platform ringed by a wall of stone elephants. The Mahavamsa devotes considerable attention to its construction, including an account of the labour arrangements and the payment of workers — one of the details historians have used to argue that these works were not built by forced labour alone.1 It was restored in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries after long abandonment.