Why Sri Lanka’s Parliament sits in Kotte, not Colombo

A fortress in the marshes

In the 14th century the island was split between rival powers. To stand up to the strongest of them, the Arya-cakravarti ruler in Jaffna, Alakesvara (also known as Nissanka Alagakkonara) built a fortress near Colombo, south of the Kelani River, at a place that came to be called Kotte, “the Fort”. Marshes protected it on all sides except a narrow neck of land, which he cut with a double line of moats.^[6] The historian Senarat Paranavitana wrote that the fortress was given the name Jayavardhanapura.^[6]

Parakramabahu VI, king from 1412 to 1467, lived at Rayigama for three years and then moved his capital to Jayavardhanapura. He built a new palace there and a temple for the Tooth Relic of the Buddha, which by then marked whoever held it as the rightful ruler. His forces conquered the kingdom of Jaffna, uniting the island for the first time since the fall of Polonnaruwa.^[6] Britannica dates Kotte as capital of the Sinhalese kingdom from 1415 to 1565, and credits the lagoons, rivers and swamps around it for its defence.^[1]

The Portuguese, and the move to Colombo

When the first Portuguese envoys were taken from Colombo to Kotte in 1505, they were led on a roundabout three-day journey to hide where the capital was. “To go to Kotte” became a Sinhalese way of saying to take the long way round.^[1]

Kotte’s later kings were weaker. In 1521 three sons of King Vijayabahu VI rose against him and split the kingdom: the eldest, Bhuvanekabahu VII, took the throne, and his brothers got the smaller territories of Sitavaka and Rayigama. Under attack from his brother Mayadunne of Sitavaka, Bhuvanekabahu turned to the Portuguese for help.^[6] His grandson Dharmapala, baptised Don Joao, became king in 1551 and came under Portuguese control. Mayadunne and his son besieged Kotte from 1560 to 1565, until the Portuguese abandoned it and moved to Colombo, taking the king with them.^[6]

The Portuguese, the Dutch and then the British each developed the port of Colombo. When the British took over the Kandyan kingdom in the hills in 1815, Colombo became the capital of the whole island.^[3] From 1930 the legislature met in a building facing the ocean at Galle Face in Colombo, opened on 29 January that year by Governor Sir Herbert Stanley.^[4]

Back to Kotte

In the decades after independence in 1948, government offices outgrew Colombo, and in 1977 the government chose Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte, under its old name, as the new capital.^[1] At a public meeting in December 1976, Anandatissa de Alwis, the United National Party’s candidate for Kotte, had asked his party leader J. R. Jayewardene to make Kotte the political capital once the party was in power. De Alwis won the seat in 1977.^[6]

Parliament itself was short of space at Galle Face.^[2] Nihal Seneviratne recalled officials needing gumboots to cross the marsh to the site, and Jayewardene being taken with a model of the new Parliament by the architect Geoffrey Bawa.^[7] Building began in 1979 on a 16-acre island in the Diyawanna Oya. Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa directed the work under President Jayewardene; Bawa was chief architect and a Japanese consortium of two Mitsui companies built it.^[2][4]

The new Parliament was opened on 29 April 1982, and its sittings moved there from Galle Face that day.^[2] Other government offices began moving to the city the following year.^[1] The Daily FT dates the formal declaration of Sri Jayewardenepura as the administrative capital to 11 February 1985; Britannica gives 1977 for its designation.^[6][1]

Who sits where today

Britannica calls Sri Jayewardenepura Kotte the legislative capital and Colombo the executive and judicial capital. Colombo holds the residences of the head of state and of the prime minister, and it remains the commercial centre.^[3][1] Writing in 2016, D.C. Ranatunga noted that the offices and official homes of the President and Prime Minister, and many ministries, were still in Colombo, while many government offices had moved out to Battaramulla and other places around Kotte.^[6]

Sri Lanka’s Constitution does not name a capital. It says the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal shall “ordinarily” exercise their jurisdiction at Colombo, and it leaves police powers in “the city of Colombo, Sri Jayewardenepura, Kotte, and their environs” out of the provinces’ hands.^[5]

Plans to finish the move keep coming back. A project begun under President Chandrika Kumaratunga to build a President’s House near the Parliament complex was revived for study in 2023, when the Urban Development Authority said it would look at moving the President’s House, the Prime Minister’s residence at Temple Trees and other offices to Kotte. It said a decision would wait for the study.^[8][9][10]