By which name did the Chinese traveller Hiuen-Tsang address the Kumaon region ?
- (a)Kartikeyapur
- (b)Brahampur
- (c)Taleshwar
- (d)Pandukeshwar
Correct — B, Brahampur.
Hiuen-Tsang (Xuanzang) travelled through India in the 630s and 640s CE and wrote up what he saw in the Si-yu-ki. Moving north from Matipura, he recorded a hill country he transcribed as Po-lo-ki-mo-pu-lo, restored in Sanskrit as Brahmapura — the Brahampur of this option.
That country is the Kumaon–Garhwal tract. Inscriptions agree with the traveller: the Taleshwar copper plates, found in the Almora area, state that the rulers of the Brahmapura kingdom belonged to the Paurava lineage, and that line was flourishing in the 7th century CE — Hiuen-Tsang's own century.
Carry away the split behind the four options: Brahmapura is the name that reaches us through an outside traveller's record, while the other three are Uttarakhand's own place-names, fixed by a dynastic capital or by copper plates found there.
- (a)Kartikeyapur — Kartikeyapura is the right answer to which town served as the capital of the Katyuri rulers — it is identified with Baijnath, in the Katyur valley of Bageshwar district.
That is a capital, not a name for the whole region. The Katyuri seat shifted to Kartikeyapura from Joshimath only around 850 CE, roughly two centuries after the traveller passed through. A name has to be current in the traveller's own century before he can be the one who used it.
- (c)Taleshwar — Taleshwar, in the Almora area, is the right answer to where the copper plates naming the Brahmapura kingdom's Paurava rulers were found.
Watch the direction of the evidence here. The Taleshwar plates are what corroborate that a kingdom called Brahmapura existed in these hills, so they support option B rather than compete with it.
A find-spot is a village; the question asks for the name applied to the region.
- (d)Pandukeshwar — Pandukeshwar, in Chamoli district near the headwaters of the Alaknanda just south of Badrinath, is the right answer to where copper-plate grants of village revenues to a temple of Narayana were found; one of those plates is dated to 853 or 854 CE.
Like Taleshwar it is an inscription site rather than a regional name, and its plates postdate Hiuen-Tsang's journey by roughly two centuries.
One region can carry several names at once, and each name is fixed by a different kind of source. A foreign traveller's account supplies one layer, royal inscriptions a second, and the seat of a ruling house a third.
For the Uttarakhand hills, the traveller's layer is Brahmapura — the Sanskrit name behind Hiuen-Tsang's Po-lo-ki-mo-pu-lo. Answering a question of this shape starts with asking which kind of source each proper noun comes from.
Hiuen-Tsang's Si-yu-ki is one of the few sustained outside descriptions of 7th-century India, and much of the political map of that century is reconstructed by reading it alongside inscriptions.
Uttarakhand is a clean example of that method working. The traveller's Po-lo-ki-mo-pu-lo and the Taleshwar plates' Brahmapura kingdom point at the same polity, which is why the identification with the Kumaon–Garhwal tract is accepted.
- Hiuen-Tsang, also written Xuanzang, travelled in India during the 630s and 640s CE, in the reign of Harshavardhana.
- His travel account is the Si-yu-ki, translated into English as Buddhist Records of the Western World.
- He reached Po-lo-ki-mo-pu-lo after travelling north from Matipura; the name is restored in Sanskrit as Brahmapura.
- Brahmapura is identified with the Kumaon–Garhwal hill tract of present-day Uttarakhand.
- The Taleshwar copper plates, found in the Almora area, record that the rulers of Brahmapura belonged to the Paurava lineage.
- The Paurava line of Brahmapura, associated with Vishnuvarman, flourished in the 7th century CE.
- Kartikeyapura, the capital linked with the Katyuri rulers, is identified with Baijnath in the Katyur valley, Bageshwar district.
- The Katyuri seat moved to Kartikeyapura from Joshimath around 850 CE.
- Pandukeshwar lies in Chamoli district near the Alaknanda headwaters, just south of Badrinath, and has yielded copper-plate inscriptions.
- A Pandukeshwar copper plate dated December 853 or September 854 CE grants village revenues to a temple of Narayana.
- The Kunindas are counted among the earliest rulers of the Kumaon region.
One of these names reaches us through a foreign traveller's record; the other three come from Uttarakhand's own capitals and copper plates.
- Treating the four proper nouns as interchangeable pieces of Uttarakhand history. The stem asks what the traveller called the region, so a dynastic capital or an inscription site cannot satisfy it, however genuine each is.
- Taleshwar is the sharpest hazard because its plates actually name Brahmapura. Mistaking the place where the evidence was found for the name the evidence records converts the corroboration for B into a reason to mark C.
- Pandukeshwar and Taleshwar are both copper-plate sites, so recognition alone does not separate them; the stem's demand for a regional name is what does.
- Ignoring chronology. Kartikeyapura became the Katyuri capital around 850 CE, when the seat moved there from Joshimath — roughly two centuries after Hiuen-Tsang had come and gone.
The idea comes as a one-line recall item: a region, a named source, and four proper nouns drawn from the same corner of Uttarakhand history.
Matching sets pair travellers with the works they wrote or the rulers whose courts they saw.
The habit that protects the mark is tagging each proper noun with its source-type — traveller's account, inscription find-spot, dynastic capital — before choosing.
UPSC_2013_GS1_Q62013Same traveller, different use of him. The UPSC item tests what Hiuen-Tsang reported about roads, robbery and trial by ordeal; this UKPSC item tests a single place-name he recorded. Both reward having read what the Si-yu-ki contains rather than knowing only that its author came to India.
UPSC_2004_GS1_Q242004Overlaps on dating. The UPSC statement pairs Hiuen-Tsang with Harsha, and that 7th-century placement is exactly what rules out a capital the Katyuris took up two centuries later. It differs in testing his relationship with a ruler and his attitude to Buddhism, not his geography.
UPPSC_2020_PRE_GSI_Q142020Both treat Hiuen-Tsang as a witness to a specific place — the Sun temple of Multan there, the Kumaon hill country here. The UPPSC item asks whether he mentioned a site alongside later Arabic and Persian writers; the UKPSC item asks for the name he gave a region.
UPPSC_2024_PRE_GSI_Q1492024Places Hiuen Tsang in a sequence with Fa-Hien, I-Tsing and Al-Biruni. The shared demand is fixing the traveller in time; the UKPSC item then needs a toponym from his account, so chronology alone will not carry it.
NDA_GAT_2022_I_Q1122022Another single-fact recall item on Chinese travellers to India, built on matching a traveller to a written record. Ours asks instead for the name a traveller applied to a region, so the fact wanted is a place-name rather than the title of a work.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Taleshwar copper plates, found in the Almora area of Uttarakhand, record the ruling lineage of which ancient kingdom?
- (a)Brahmapura
- (b)Kuninda
- (c)Panchala
- (d)Videha
Answera — The Taleshwar plates state that the rulers of the Brahmapura kingdom belonged to the Paurava lineage, which is what ties the epigraphic record to the region Hiuen-Tsang called Po-lo-ki-mo-pu-lo.Kuninda is a real Himalayan-foothill power and among the earliest rulers of this region, but it is known chiefly from its coinage, not from these plates.
Panchala was a janapada of the Ganga–Yamuna doab and Videha lay in the Mithila country of north Bihar, so neither belongs to the Kumaon hills at all.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Chinese traveller Hiuen-Tsang (Xuanzang) visited India during the reign of which ruler?
- (a)Kanishka
- (b)Chandragupta II
- (c)Harshavardhana
- (d)Samudragupta
Answerc — Hiuen-Tsang was in India in the 630s and 640s CE, which places him in Harshavardhana's reign; his account and Banabhatta's Harshacharita are the two pillars of what we know about that court.Kanishka belongs to the Kushana period and is associated with the Fourth Buddhist Council, well before Hiuen-Tsang.
Chandragupta II is the ruler in whose time Fa-Hien travelled, and Samudragupta is known above all from the Prayag Prashasti of Harisena — both Gupta-era figures, so both are too early.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Kartikeyapura, the capital associated with the Katyuri rulers, is generally identified with which present-day town of Uttarakhand?
- (a)Baijnath
- (b)Champawat
- (c)Srinagar
- (d)Almora
Answera — Kartikeyapura is identified with Baijnath, which lies in the Katyur valley in Bageshwar district and gives the dynasty its name.Champawat is linked with the early seat of the Chand rulers of Kumaon, and Almora with their later capital; Almora is also the area where the Taleshwar copper plates were found.
Srinagar on the Alaknanda is associated with the Garhwal kingdom, a different polity in the western hills.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which of the following Uttarakhand sites lies in Chamoli district near the headwaters of the Alaknanda, just south of Badrinath, and is known for early-medieval copper-plate grants to a temple of Narayana?
- (a)Pandukeshwar
- (b)Taleshwar
- (c)Baijnath
- (d)Champawat
Answera — Pandukeshwar sits in the Alaknanda gorge just south of Badrinath in Chamoli district, and its copper plates record grants of village revenues to a temple of Narayana, one of them dated to 853 or 854 CE.Taleshwar lies in the Almora area of Kumaon and its plates concern the Paurava rulers of Brahmapura, not a Narayana temple grant.
Baijnath is in the Katyur valley of Bageshwar district and Champawat is in eastern Kumaon, so neither matches the Chamoli location the stem describes.