Who built the Vatadage? The Culavamsa, an ancient chronicle, records that Parakramabahu I constructed a circular stone shrine to house the Tooth Relic of the Buddha during his twelfth-century reign. Bell believed this description matched the Vatadage. But the Rajavaliya and Poojavaliya, other historical texts, credit the structure to Nissanka Malla, who ruled from 1187 to 1196. A stone inscription Nissanka Malla placed nearby claims the Vatadage as his work, built by one of his generals under royal direction. The archaeologist Arthur Maurice Hocart proposed a compromise that most scholars now accept: Parakramabahu I built the original structure, and Nissanka Malla renovated it, adding the entrance and outer porch. Wilhelm Geiger, translator of the Mahavamsa, and historian H.W. Codrington agreed. The Vatadage, then, is the work of two kings - one who built it and one who claimed it.

The architecture is organized around concentricity. A circular lower platform, 120 feet in diameter, admits visitors through a single northern entrance. From there, four elaborately constructed doorways - oriented north, south, east, and west - lead to the upper platform, 80 feet across and surrounded by a two-foot-thick brick wall. At the center sits a small stupa with a base diameter of 27 feet, the sacred object the entire structure was designed to protect. Around this stupa, four Buddha statues sit facing the four entrances, each five feet tall on two-foot stone seats, hands in the Dhyana mudra of meditation. Three concentric rings of stone columns once filled the upper platform: an inner ring of 16, a middle ring of 20, and an outer ring of 32. The outer columns, about eight feet tall, are all that substantially remain. Each column base is carved in the shape of a lotus flower.

If the Vatadage's architecture impresses through geometry and scale, its carvings achieve something more intimate. The sandakada pahana - moonstone - at the northern entrance is widely considered the finest example of this uniquely Sri Lankan architectural element. These semicircular carved stones, placed at the threshold of sacred buildings, depict the cycle of samsara through concentric bands of flames, animals, and lotus flowers. Visitors literally step over the cycle of suffering to enter a holy space. At the eastern entrance, two muragalas - guard stones - stand watch, among the best of their kind from the Polonnaruwa period. Bell, who spent years excavating here, wrote that the carvings on the upper platform are 'unrivalled, whether at Anuradhapura or Polonnaruwa, and probably in any other Buddhist shrine of Ceylon.' The judgment has held.

After Kalinga Magha's invasion in 1215, Polonnaruwa was abandoned. The Sinhalese court moved south, and the great dry zone capital vanished into vegetation. The Vatadage disappears from the chronicles entirely - no pilgrimages, no repairs, no mentions. For nearly seven hundred years, the finest circular shrine in Sri Lanka existed only as a wooded hillock. When Bell began digging in 1903, the structure that emerged was remarkably intact. The brick wall still stood. Two of the four Buddha figures were largely whole, carved from solid rock and heavy enough that even the jungle could not dislodge them. The moonstones and guard stones survived beneath their blanket of earth. Today the Vatadage anchors the Sacred Quadrangle of Polonnaruwa's ruins, the building that best demonstrates what Sinhalese architecture could achieve - and how thoroughly time can erase even the most sacred places.