Sri Lanka has no officially declared national animal, but two animals fill the role by tradition. The lion (Sinhala sinha) is the heraldic symbol: it has stood on the national flag since independence in 1948 and on the state emblem since 1954, and it gives the Sinhalese people their name, even though no wild lion has lived on the island for tens of thousands of years. The Sri Lankan elephant (Elephas maximus maximus), the largest subspecies of Asian elephant, is the living animal most often named instead, and a tusker carries the casket of the sacred tooth relic through Kandy every July or August. The officially declared wildlife symbols are the Sri Lankan junglefowl (national bird) and the Sri Lankan birdwing (national butterfly).
Lion, Elephant or Squirrel: What Sri Lanka Has Never Made Official
The 1978 Constitution fixes only a few national symbols: the flag, the anthem "Sri Lanka Matha", the national day and the national languages, which since the Thirteenth Amendment of 1987 have been both Sinhala and Tamil. Other emblems were added by government declaration. The blue water lily (Nymphaea nouchali, known locally as nil mahanel) and the Ceylon ironwood (Mesua ferrea) became the national flower and national tree on 26 February 1986. The blue sapphire was named the national gemstone in October 2003, marked by a 4.50-rupee stamp, and volleyball was recognised as the national sport in 1991.
For wildlife, the official choices are both endemic species found nowhere else: the Sri Lankan junglefowl (Gallus lafayettii), a wild relative of the domestic chicken, and the Sri Lankan birdwing (Troides darsius), the island's largest butterfly, chosen as a flagship for its butterfly conservation plan. A national mammal was never declared. Reference lists therefore give three unofficial answers: the lion, the elephant and, less often, the grizzled giant squirrel (Ratufa macroura), a large grey tree squirrel of the Central and Uva highlands that Sinhala speakers call dandu lena. Of the three, the lion has the deepest claim on national identity.
Sinhabahu and Prince Vijaya: The Mahavamsa's Lion Ancestor
The lion's place begins with a founding legend told in the Mahavamsa, the Pali chronicle compiled by Buddhist monks at the Mahavihara in Anuradhapura. In its version, a princess named Suppadevi, of the Vanga kingdom in what is now Bengal, is carried off by a lion, Sinha, and bears him two children, a son Sinhabahu ("lion-armed") and a daughter Sinhasivali. The family escapes, and Sinhabahu later kills his lion father. His son Vijaya is exiled for misconduct and sails to Lanka with 700 followers, landing at Tambapanni, where the chronicle dates his arrival to about 543 BCE. There he marries Kuveni, daughter of a yaksha leader, before taking a princess from the Pandya kingdom of southern India as his queen.
Vijaya is a legendary figure; no archaeological evidence confirms his reign, and genetic studies link the Sinhalese to both northern and southern Indian populations. The legend nonetheless explains the name. One reading in the Mahavamsa takes Sinhala as "lion-slayer", for Sinhabahu's deed; another takes it simply as "people of the lion". Either way, the Sinhalese, about 75 per cent of Sri Lanka's population, carry the animal in their name, and later tradition holds that Vijaya raised a lion banner on landing. The arrival scene is painted in Cave 17 at Ajanta in India, showing how far the story travelled.
The Kandyan Standard, 1815 to 1948: How the Lion Reached the Flag
The only ancient depiction of the Sinhalese lion banner was a mural in Cave 2 of the Dambulla cave temple, showing King Dutugemunu marching against the South Indian ruler Elara in 162 BCE beneath a flag bearing a lion holding a sword in its right forepaw, with symbols of the sun and moon. The lion figure on it was defaced by a vandal in 1957. The same basic design was the royal standard of the Kingdom of Kandy until 1815, when the Kandyan Convention ended the reign of the last king, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha. The British replaced his standard with the Union Flag and took the original to England, where it was kept at the Royal Hospital Chelsea.
A century later, independence campaigners E. W. Perera and D. R. Wijewardena found the flag in Chelsea, and a photograph of it ran in the newspaper Dinamina, showing most islanders the Kandyan design for the first time. On 16 January 1948, Mudaliyar A. Sinnalebbe, member of parliament for Batticaloa, proposed it as the national flag, and the Lion Flag was adopted for the Dominion of Ceylon that year. It was changed in 1953 and redesigned in 1972, when four bo leaves replaced the spearheads in the corners. Today a golden lion holding a kastane sword stands on a maroon field for the Sinhalese, beside an orange stripe for the Tamils and a teal stripe for the Muslim Moors. The full meaning of every element is covered in our guide to the flag of Sri Lanka.
The state emblem followed in 1954, when the College of Arms granted Ceylon a roundel with the gold Kandyan lion beneath a crown. The crown was dropped in 1972, when Ceylon became the Republic of Sri Lanka, and the present emblem, designed by the Venerable Mapalagama Wipulasara Maha Thera under the direction of Nissanka Wijeyeratne, shows the same gold lion passant with its sword, ringed by blue lotus petals and set on a grain vase from which sheaves of rice curve round the border.
Sigiriya, the Lion Rock of King Kashyapa I
The lion also names the island's best-known monument. Sigiriya, more properly Sinhagiri or "Lion Rock", is a granite column about 180 m high near Dambulla. According to the Culavamsa chronicle, King Kashyapa I, who ruled from 477 to 495 CE, moved his capital there and built a gateway halfway up in the shape of an enormous lion; the head has gone, but the two giant paws still flank the stairs. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Panthera leo sinhaleyus: Did Lions Ever Live in Sri Lanka?
They did, but long before people. In 1938 the palaeontologist Paulus Deraniyagala named a new subspecies, Panthera leo sinhaleyus, from a single lower carnassial tooth dug from deposits at Kuruwita in Sabaragamuwa Province. A second fossil, a poorly preserved canine tooth, was found about four miles away in 1947. A 2005 study of the Kuruwita cat fossils described the material only as Panthera leo, so whether it was a distinct subspecies is unsettled. These lions are thought to have died out before humans reached the island around 37,000 BCE. They shared the wet lowlands with leopards, a hippopotamus and several extinct elephants, part of what palaeontologists call the Rathnapura fauna.
That gap matters for the symbol. The Sinha of the flag and the Mahavamsa is a heraldic and mythical beast, not a memory of local wildlife. The lion as a species, Panthera leo, survives today only in sub-Saharan Africa and in a single population in western India, and is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Sri Lanka's only living big cat is the leopard.
From Portuguese Arms to Yala: The Sri Lankan Elephant
If the lion is the Sinhalese emblem, the elephant was the island's emblem in foreign eyes. The coat of arms the Portuguese used for their Ceylon territories between 1505 and 1658 placed an elephant in the foreground beneath palm trees and mountains. A Dutch arms recorded in a manuscript of 1717 to 1720 kept the elephant, now holding a cinnamon branch in its trunk beside three bales of cinnamon, the colony's chief export. British Ceylon's colonial shield also carried an elephant and coconut palms.
The animal behind those arms is a heavyweight. Carl Linnaeus named the Asian elephant Elephas maximus in 1758, and the Sri Lankan form, E. m. maximus, is the species' type subspecies. It is also the largest, standing 2 to 3.5 m at the shoulder and weighing 2,000 to 5,500 kg. It has darker skin than mainland Asian elephants, with larger patches of depigmentation on the ears, face, trunk and belly, and only about 7 per cent of males grow tusks. An adult can eat up to 150 kg of plants a day; one two-year study in the north-west recorded elephants feeding on 116 plant species, more than half of them shrubs, herbs, grasses and climbers rather than trees.
Elephants once ranged from the coast to the highest mountains, but colonial planting of coffee and then tea wiped out the montane population, and hunting was ruthless: between 1829 and 1855 more than 6,000 elephants were captured or shot under British rule. Today herds live mainly in the dry zone of the north, east and south-east, in parks such as Yala, Udawalawe, Wilpattu and Minneriya, and Sri Lanka is thought to have the highest elephant density in Asia. The 2011 survey counted 5,879 wild elephants, and estimates had risen to about 7,500 by 2019. For how that compares with other range countries, see our ranking of countries with the most elephants.
Kandy, Minneriya and the Human-Elephant Conflict
The elephant's cultural role is clearest in Kandy. Each July and August the Esala Perahera honours the sacred tooth relic of the Buddha kept at the Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Tooth, with robed and lit elephants parading through the city between fire dancers and whip dancers, before the festival ends with a water-cutting ceremony on the Mahaweli River at Getambe. The procession blends a rain-making ritual thought to date from the 3rd century BCE with the tooth-relic parade begun after the relic reached the island in the 4th century CE. Domesticated elephants for such pageants are scarcer than they were: a 1970 census counted 532 among 378 owners, and by 1982 the figure had fallen to 344.
In the wild, the best-known spectacle is the dry-season gathering at Minneriya, a national park since 12 August 1997 around a reservoir built by King Mahasen in the 3rd century CE. In the dry season herds are drawn to the grass fields on the edges of the reservoir, usually 150 to 200 elephants and by some reports up to 700. The same pressure that drives them to water drives conflict with farmers: as of 2006 about 65 per cent of the elephants' range lay outside protected areas, and between 1999 and 2006 nearly 100 wild elephants a year were killed to protect crops and houses.
So the honest answer to the question has two parts. The lion is Sri Lanka's national animal in heraldry, on the flag, the emblem and in the very name of its largest people, while the elephant is the national animal in the landscape and in Buddhist ritual. Neighbouring India, by contrast, made its choice official, as our guide to the national animal of India explains.