The Padmanabhaswamy temple treasure is a collection of valuable objects including gold thrones, crowns, coins, statues and ornaments, diamonds and other precious stones.
[1] The discovery of the treasure attracted widespread national and international media attention as it is considered to be the largest collection of items of gold and precious stones in the recorded history of the world.
[2][3][4][5] On the possibility of future appropriation of the wealth, for the need of a new management and proper inventorying of the articles in the vaults, a public interest petition was registered with the Supreme court of India.
[10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Most scholars believe that this was accumulated over thousands of years, given the mention of the Deity and the Temple in several extant Hindu Texts, the Tamil Sangam literature (500 BC to 300 AD wherein it was referred to as the "Golden Temple" on account of its then unimaginable wealth), and the treasures consist of countless artifacts dating back to the Chera, Pandya, and Greek and Roman epochs.
[10][11][15][16] Also, much of the treasures housed in the much larger and as-yet-unopened vaults, as well as in the much smaller cellars that have been opened, date back to long before the institution of the so-called Travancore Kingdom, e.g. the 800-kg hoard of gold coins from 200 B.C that was mentioned by Vinod Rai.
From 1766 until 1792, Travancore also provided refuge to around a dozen other Hindu rulers who had fled their own princely states along the Malabar Coast, due to fears of possible military defeat by Kingdom of Mysore.
These rulers, and their extended family members, also left their wealth with Lord Padmanabha, when they finally returned home, after Mysore's military defeat by the British forces in 1792.