Sri Lanka’s first great capital was simultaneously a royal seat, an agricultural engineering masterwork, and the most important centre of Theravada Buddhist scholarship in the ancient world for close to a thousand years. The Sri Maha Bodhi – grown from a cutting of the original Bodhi tree and tended without interruption since 288 BCE – is the oldest documented living human-planted tree on earth and still the focal point of daily pilgrimage. Anuradhapura is best understood not as an archaeological site but as a sacred city that happens to be ancient.