In early 1998, Kandy stood witness to a cultural tragedy. The Temple of the Tooth, guardian of the Buddha's relic and a cornerstone of Sri Lanka's heritage, became the target of an act of violence that shook the nation.

On January 25th of that year, three Black Tigers steered a truck packed with explosives into the Temple's main entrance. The detonation tore through the sacred monument, killing at least twenty-five people, injuring many more, and leaving the structure gravely wounded. The explosion shattered murals, splintered wooden carvings, scarred stone sculptures, and disfigured the monumental gateway that for centuries had welcomed pilgrims.

A vast restoration campaign began almost immediately. Hundreds of architects, engineers, artists, and traditional craftsmen rallied to heal the wounds of the monument. Among the most daunting tasks was the reconstruction of the great Mahawahalkada, the monumental entrance of the Temple.

In this moment of uncertainty, the archives that would one day form the Suriyakantha Centre revealed their unexpected value. Jacques Soulié and Rohan de Silva — whose collections would later become the nucleus of the Suriyakantha Centre as it exists today — became aware of the difficulties faced by the restoration team. They remembered that their archives held a rare photographic album, acquired in Paris, containing images of the Temple of the Tooth.

When these images — captured in the 1880s and 1890s by the British photographers William Skeen and Charles Thomas Scowen — were examined by Niranjan Wijerathne, the secular guardian of the Temple who directed the restoration, they revealed a striking discovery. The staircase of the Mahawahalkada, long believed to have five steps, had in fact once possessed six. At some point during the twentieth century, one had disappeared beneath later urban works.

Guided by this century-old evidence, the restoration teams re-established the entrance in its original form. The Mahawahalkada was rebuilt with six steps, just as the photographers had recorded it, and the carved elephants and low reliefs were modeled on details preserved in those fragile prints.

By an extraordinary twist of history, a handful of photographs taken by two Englishmen in colonial Ceylon, collected decades later by a Frenchman, returned to Kandy a hundred years on to restore its most sacred site. The Temple of the Tooth, scarred by violence yet reborn through memory, regained its dignity — its entrance once again standing as it had in centuries past, where pilgrims still ascend, step by step, toward the relic within.