Ph.D. Student Yunheng Xu

Yunheng Xu completed his M.A. in Cultural and Religious History of South Asia at the University of Heidelberg and his B.A. in English Philology at Fudan University. In May 2025, he joined the Hindu Temple Legends Project as a doctoral student under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ute Hüsken. His research interest consists in Tamil epigraphy, South Indian temples, Late Imperial Sino-Nepalese relation, and East Asian Art.

His research project titled “The Ulakaḷanta Perumāḷ Temple through its Inscriptions and its Legends” aims to investigate the inscriptions of the Ulakaḷanta Perumāḷ Temple in Kanchipuram, a centre of great historical and religious importance. While previous scholarship has examined the socio-economic implications of selected inscriptions or employed them to reconstruct a brief temple history, this study will comprehensively re-examine the materials, the Madras Museum Plates and more than 20 stone inscriptions published by the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology. The study will interpret them in a broader landscape of the entire city, drawing on about 300 contemporaneous inscriptions (10th–15th centuries) collected from published reports and editions. Thus, it will enable us to contextualise the Ulakaḷanta Perumāḷ Temple with the dynamic urban environment in the era of “instability, opportunity, and innovation”, when new religious ideas and archival practices emerged after the prime of the Chola state. By collecting and analysing these inscriptions alongside literary sources, including devotional poems and Māhātmyas, this study investigates the diachronic changes and continuity in spatial concepts, religious beliefs, and temple activities.