Around 10,000 police officers have been deployed to the temple as Sri Lankan Buddhists stage a 10-day exhibition of the tooth of the Buddha, which will feature the left canine tooth of the tooth.
Police said the armed forces would bolster security at the 16th-century temple in Kandy, where a Tamil separatist suicide attack killed 16 people in 1998.
“We expect around two million devotees to visit Kandy during the 10-day exhibition,” a police officer told AFP.
“There will be airport-style security at the entrance,” he added, warning that luggage and cameras were prohibited.
Classes have been cancelled at all schools in Kandy as they have been converted to accommodate a large security presence.
Queues to enter the temple stretched more than two kilometres before the exhibition opens on Friday afternoon, according to a live police map.
It is estimated that more than a million people visited the Unesco World Heritage site when the tooth was last on display in March 2009.
Bombing in 1998 destroyed the temple’s walls and windows and exposed 18th-century frescoes that had been painted over several times over the course of the site’s history.
Some of the exposed frescoes are on display at the temple’s heavily guarded museum, which says they date to between 1707 and 1739, when Kandy was the seat of the monarchy that ruled the island.
