Vallipuram

Vallipuram’s Tamil name means ‘Sandy City,’ a fitting description for a site now largely surrounded by dunes, yet whose modest ruins have yielded two of the most significant, and most debated, archaeological finds anywhere on the Jaffna Peninsula.

A Gold Plate Found Beneath a Temple Floor

In 1936, workers digging the foundation of an ancient structure adjacent to Vallipuram’s Vishnu Kovil unearthed a small gold sheet, roughly 3½ inches long, weighing just 69.5 grains, that would go on to become one of the most historically significant inscriptions ever found in Sri Lanka. Written in early Sinhala using Brahmi script, the inscription records the construction of a Buddhist vihara at a place called Badakara Atana, commissioned by a person named Piyaguka Tissa while the minister Isigirayan governed the region of Nagadipa, all dated to the reign of King Vasabha, who ruled from roughly 67 to 111 CE. The gold plate is now preserved in the Anuradhapura Gallery of the Colombo National Museum.

That inscription, along with a separately discovered Nelugala stone inscription referencing a local ruler named Azhagiri, has been cited by some historians as evidence that Sinhalese rule extended into the Jaffna region during the pre-Christian and early Common Era period, under the broader authority of Anuradhapura. That interpretation, and the scholarly translation work behind it led by archaeologist Senarath Paranavitana, has proven genuinely controversial, drawn directly into wider, unresolved debates about Sri Lanka’s ancient ethnic and political history, debates that remain sensitive and actively contested to this day.

A Buddha Statue’s Unlikely Journey to Thailand

Vallipuram’s second major find came decades earlier, in 1902, when a finely carved limestone Buddha statue in the Amaravati sculptural style, associated with ancient Andhra Pradesh in India, was unearthed roughly 50 yards northeast of the Vishnu Kovil. The statue sat largely forgotten in the temple’s storage room until 1902, when it was set up publicly under a Bo tree in Jaffna. Then, in a genuinely unusual turn, British Governor Sir Henry Blake presented the statue as a gift to the King of Siam in 1906, at the Siamese king’s own particular request, given the statue’s archaic, historically significant style. That gift effectively removed the statue from Sri Lanka entirely, and for close to 90 years afterward, it went largely unseen and unremarked upon by the Tamil and Sinhalese communities who might otherwise have claimed a connection to it, its whereabouts in Thailand only more recently rediscovered by researchers.

Visiting Tips

• Visit the adjacent Vishnu Kovil (Thunnalai Sri Vallipura Aalvar Kovil) to see the site’s active religious life alongside its archaeological history.
• Approach the site’s contested historical interpretations with genuine curiosity rather than assuming a single settled narrative.
• Combine with nearby Point Pedro and Manalkadu Desert, both a short distance away.
• Set modest expectations for visible ruins on-site, since the area’s most significant finds are now held in museums or, in the Buddha statue’s case, in Thailand.

Where It Sits on the Map

Frequently Asked Questions

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