Lalitaditya Muktapida Built the Martand Sun Temple in Kashmir, and Both Kalhana's Chronicle and the Tang Annals of China Record His Reign

The Martand Sun Temple at Mattan, in Anantnag district about 63 km south of Srinagar, was built by King Lalitaditya Muktapida of the Karkota dynasty in the eighth century, according to Kalhana’s Sanskrit chronicle, the Rajatarangini. What remains is a ruined sanctuary inside a colonnaded courtyard that Ram Chandra Kak, in his 1933 survey Ancient Monuments of Kashmir, gave as 220 feet long and 142 feet broad. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) lists it as “Ancient temple of Martand together with adjacent land”, one of 56 centrally protected monuments in Jammu and Kashmir.

A second, entirely separate record names the same king. In the New Book of Tang, a Chinese dynastic history, the ruler of Kashmir appears as Muduobi, together with an account of the envoy he sent to the Tang court.

What Kalhana wrote about the temple

Kalhana composed the Rajatarangini, a verse history of Kashmir’s kings, between 1148 and 1150 by the dating of M. A. Stein, who translated it into English in 1900. Book IV covers Lalitaditya. In Stein’s rendering of verse 192, the king built the Martanda shrine “with its massive walls of stone within a lofty enclosure”. In Stein’s reading, the enclosure is the temple’s colonnaded courtyard.

Martanda is a name of the sun. According to Stein, the sacred springs of the Martanda pilgrimage place lie about a mile north-west of the ruin, at the foot of the plateau. The Nilamata, a Kashmiri text, already lists the place among those sacred to Surya, and Stein infers that the sun had been worshipped there since early times.

Who built what at the site has been argued since the 1840s. Alexander Cunningham, writing in 1848, took Kalhana’s words to mean that an earlier king, Ranaditya, built the central shrine and Lalitaditya added only the enclosure. That reading was rejected by Stein and by the architectural writer James Fergusson. Kalhana, Stein points out, gives Ranaditya a Martanda temple at a village called Simharotsika, a place Stein could not locate.

Kak, writing later, called Kalhana’s wording ambiguous but judged it most probable that the temple as it stands was Lalitaditya’s, built in the middle of the eighth century. A finding from the excavation of the courtyard, Kak added, bears on the question: the base of a smaller, older temple lay enveloped inside the larger base, which he thought was probably Ranaditya’s. The sources therefore agree on the builder of the surviving temple and differ on whether another stood on the spot before it.

The king in Kalhana’s account

Lalitaditya, also called Muktapida, was the youngest of three sons of King Pratapaditya II. In Kalhana’s count his reign lasted 36 years, 7 months and 11 days, which Stein’s chronology places at about 699 to 736 CE. Those dates need adjusting, Stein showed, because a Chinese record of his reign, described below, fits a later period.

As Kalhana tells it, the king was a conqueror who spent his reign mostly on expeditions. He says Lalitaditya defeated Yashovarman, the ruler of Kanyakubja (Kanauj), and then marched round the whole of India. That circuit Stein judged to be a conventional poetic tour of conquest, “manifestly legendary” in his words, and the later stops among the Uttarakurus and a land of women to be purely mythological.

Other parts Stein accepted as historical. The chronicle names the hill territories of Jalandhara and Lohara, now Kangra and Poonch, as held by Lalitaditya’s feudatories, and says he defeated the Tibetans, the Darads and the Tukharas. His minister Chankuna is described as a Tukhara, from the upper Oxus region, and Stein thought it probable that the name was a Chinese title meaning general. A Chinese pilgrim, Ou-k’ong, visited Kashmir in 759 to 763, a few years after the king’s death, and saw a monastery that Kalhana credits to Chankuna.

Lalitaditya’s end, in Kalhana’s telling, came on an expedition to the far north, and three traditions circulated. They were death from out-of-season snow in a country called Aryanaka, suicide when cut off from his army on a mountain route, and a retreat into the land of the immortals. From these varying accounts Stein concluded that the king probably died on an unsuccessful northern campaign.

What the Tang annals record

Compilers under the Song dynasty, headed by Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi, produced the New Book of Tang from earlier records. Its chapter on the western regions has an entry on Kashmir, written under two Chinese transliterations of the name. It says the country was ringed by mountains that kept other states from attacking it, and that its king ruled from a city on a great river.

The entry records that in year 8 of the Kaiyuan period (720 CE) the Tang court invested a king of Kashmir whom Stein identifies as Chandrapida, an elder brother of Lalitaditya. The entry then says that a king named Tianmu died and his younger brother Muduobi took the throne. Muduobi and Muktapida are the same man, in Stein’s judgment beyond doubt.

Muduobi sent an envoy named Wuliduo to the Tang court. According to the entry, the envoy told the emperor that Kashmir had been a subject state since its founding, and that it fielded elephants, horses and infantry. He said the king, together with the king of Central India, had blocked Tibet’s five great roads and won battles there. If a Tang army marched to Bolu, the region Stein identifies as Baltistan, the king could supply grain even for 200,000 men. The king also offered to build a shrine for the emperor at the Mahapadma dragon pool, which Stein identifies as the Wular Lake, and asked for formal investiture. The court feasted the envoy in a palace hall, gave him gifts and invested Muduobi as king.

The embassy, by Stein’s dating, came after a Chinese expedition against Baltistan that took place between 736 and 747, and in the reign of the Emperor Xuanzong, which ran from 713 to 755. That is why he held that Lalitaditya lived and reigned later than Kalhana’s figures allow. The Chinese entry, Stein noted, gives a very different picture of Kashmir’s power than Kalhana does, since it shows a king asking for an alliance. By Stein’s account the court contented itself with treating the envoy lavishly and did not accede to the request for an alliance.

The two accounts meet on one point: the Tibetans were the enemy, and Kalhana, too, credits Lalitaditya with victory over them.

A festival remembered by al-Biruni

A third witness is al-Biruni, whose account of India dates from about 1030. He reports that the people of Kashmir celebrated the second day of the month of Chaitra as a festival for a victory their king Muttai had won over the Turks. He doubted their claim that Muttai had ruled the whole world, noting that such claims were made of most of their kings. Professor Buhler read Muttai as a form of Muktapida, and Stein judged that highly probable.

The temple on the plateau

The temple stands on a high plateau, called a karewa or udar in Kashmir, whose foot looks out over the valley plain. Kak’s survey, which draws on Cunningham’s 1848 description and on ASI excavation reports, gives its layout. A main sanctuary stands at the centre of a rectangular courtyard. Cunningham gave the sanctuary as 63 feet long at its eastern end, with three chambers (an open front porch, a middle chamber and an inner shrine) and walls 9 feet thick. He reconstructed a pyramidal roof and put the height of the whole mass at about 75 feet.

The courtyard is surrounded by a colonnade. Facing the courtyard Kak counts 84 fluted columns, and he quotes Cunningham’s tally of 70 round columns, 10 square ones and four in the central porches, which he took to match a number sacred to the sun. A PTI report of 30 March 2024 describes the courtyard as surrounded instead by 84 smaller shrines, so the sources agree on the number and differ on what the 84 are. In Kak’s words the colonnade is the largest of its kind in Kashmir.

The carving, though worn, identifies the dedication. Kak describes the river goddesses Ganga on her crocodile and Yamuna on her tortoise on the walls of the middle chamber, and three-headed figures of Vishnu on the antechamber walls. A panel on the east wall appears to show Aruna, the charioteer of Surya, holding the reins of the sun’s seven horses. In Kak’s view Martand is the earliest dated example he knew of the cellular quadrangle, a courtyard lined with small chambers, though he adds that he cannot say it was the first.

Two other temples of the same century stand far to the south: the Virupaksha temple at Pattadakal in Karnataka and the rock-cut Kailasa temple at Ellora in Maharashtra. India’s best-known temple to the sun god, the chariot at Konark in Odisha, was built in the thirteenth century.

Parihasapura and the king’s other foundations

Kalhana describes a long list of buildings Lalitaditya raised, and Stein judged from the ruins he could identify that the chronicler’s account of their scale was not exaggerated. Largest of them was Parihasapura, a town the king founded as his residence. Kalhana lists a series of great temples at the town and a Buddhist monastery with a colossal Buddha image that was still standing in his own day. The record shows the king endowing both Hindu and Buddhist foundations. The ASI protects the stupa, chaitya and monastery at Parihaspora as a separate monument under the same Srinagar Circle.

Ruin, excavation and protection

In later reigns Kalhana mentions the temple again. It escaped plunder under King Harsha, who ruled from 1089 to 1101, and was used as a fortified position by rebels in the chronicler’s own time. Stein records that Jonaraja, who wrote as court historian to Sultan Zain-ul-abidin, lists it among the temples destroyed by Sultan Sikandar. Sikandar’s reign Kak dates to 1390 to 1414, and he adds that the manner of the temple’s ruin is still a matter of conjecture.

Custody of the ruin now rests with the ASI, through its Srinagar Circle, which Rising Kashmir reported on 29 July 2025 had received ₹20.28 crore between 2019-20 and 2024-25 for conservation across the union territory. The Jammu and Kashmir administration’s culture department scheduled an officers’ meeting for 1 April 2024 on the protection, conservation and restoration of the temple, with the ASI’s Srinagar Circle superintendent among those invited, PTI reported on 30 March 2024. On 12 February 2026 the Ministry of Culture told the Rajya Sabha that the ASI cares for 56 centrally protected monuments in Jammu and Kashmir, and that LiDAR mapping, geographic information systems and drone surveys had been proposed for selected sites, among them the Sun Temple Martand, the Group of Temples at Naranag and the ancient temple at Buniyar. Its 2025-26 allocation for conservation and development in the region was ₹5.75 crore, of which ₹4.97 crore had been spent by 27 January 2026. The listed work at Martand is the upgrading of its pathway and the fixing of CCTV cameras.