Nadungamuwa Raja
Sri Lankan elephant
Nadungamuwa Vijaya Raja (Sinhala: නැදුන්ගමුව විජය රාජා, Tamil: நெதுன்கமுவ விஜய ராஜா), simply Nadungamuwa Raja (c. 1953 – 7 March 2022), was an Indian elephant used as a ceremonial tusker in Sri Lanka.
From 2005 to 2021, he was the main Casket bearer of the Kandy Esala Perahera, an annual procession held to pay homage to the Sacred Tooth Relic of Buddha, held in Kandy, Sri Lanka. One of the most celebrated elephants in Asia during his lifetime, Nadungamuwa Raja was one of the largest tame elephants in Asia.
Following Nadungamuwe Raja's death, the then Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa declared Raja a national treasure, in recognition of his valuable services to the religion and culture of Sri Lanka.
History
Raja was born c. 1953 in Mysore, India. The village of Nadungamuwa has been home to temple elephants since 1917, when Livnis Perera, the grandfather of Raja's final owner, Harsha Dharmavijaya, bought an elephant in order to take his younger brother in a procession to the Balummahara Godagedara Pirivena, Perera. That elephant was the first in the Nadungamuwa elephant lineage. The village of Nadungamuwa celebrated the centenary of the lineage in 2018 with Raja, who was considered to be the most important elephant in the country.
In 1978, when Raja was 25 years old, he was acquired from his second owner, Herbert Wickramasinghe, a former parliamentarian from Bandaragama, for Rs.
“Nadungamuwa Raja” enters the record as sri Lankan elephant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nadungamuwa, Raja and Lankan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16986164. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 2022, 2005 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nadungamuwa Raja” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.