Visit the ancient city of Anuradhapura on a full moon day and the past feels anything but distant.Buddhist pilgrims dressed in white walk barefoot along dusty paths. Saffron-robed monks chant at dawn. Foreign visitors — from Taiwan to Canada — join local worshipers in rituals that have been performed here, largely uninterrupted, for more than 2,000 years.Set on Sri Lanka’s north-central plains, Anuradhapura was the island’s first great capital. Today, it remains one of the most sacred cities in the Buddhist world, known as the first place to adopt Buddhism outside of India. Scattered across its vast archaeological park are monasteries, reservoirs and stupas that rank among the most ambitious religious monuments ever built.AdvertisementAdvertisementTowering above them is the immense, bubble-shaped dome of Jetavanaramaya — a structure so large that when it was completed in the early fourth century CE, it ranked as the third-largest man‑made building on Earth, surpassed only by the Great Pyramids of Giza.Completed around 301 CE using an estimated 93.3 million baked mud bricks, the stupa originally rose to around 122 meters (400 feet), making it one of the tallest structures of the ancient world.Restoration work carried out in 2010 at the Abhayagiri Dagoba, another stupa at Jetavanaramaya. – John Elk III/The Image Bank RF/Getty ImagesToday, after centuries of collapse, abandonment and restoration, Jetavanaramaya stands at roughly 71 meters (233 feet) — still monumental, but little more than half its original height. Even so, it remains the largest brick structure by volume ever constructed.So vast is its mass that archaeologists estimate its bricks could build a three-foot-high wall stretching from London to Edinburgh — or from New York City to Pittsburgh.AdvertisementAdvertisementYet outside Sri Lanka, Jetavanaramaya …
