Buddhist sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

This map covers everything belonging to one religion rather than its places of worship alone. Temples and their grounds lead it, and stupas, wayside shrines, monasteries, temple graveyards, ruined temples and schools follow. There are more than 130,000 sites worldwide. Colour represents what kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records. Where there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Each site is an object a mapper drew at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we have merged in no national register of temples.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says Buddhist, or when the feature is a stupa. Stupas, chortens and pagodas have rules of their own, because the first version of these maps left them out altogether, and a stupa is the emblematic structure of the religion. We count a stupa even where it records no religion, since almost every tagged one says Buddhist. We infer nothing further. Some 20,000 features tagged as temple buildings record no religion, and we leave them off rather than guess, because Buddhism accounts for only about a third of the temples whose religion is recorded.

Colour

Colour represents what kind of site it is rather than which religion, because the religion is the whole map. Temples and other places of worship are about four-fifths of it. Stupas, chortens, pagodas and wayside shrines, things you pass or walk around rather than enter, are about a tenth. Temple precincts mapped as their own plot come next, then monasteries, then burial sites, which are mostly temple graveyards. Former sites, religious buildings, offices, schools and community buildings each appear in smaller numbers.

Monastic houses

This is the one map in the family where monasteries are a main feature rather than a curiosity. Thousands of monastic houses are mapped, many of them working communities rather than historic remains. We draw them as a class of their own so you can pick them out from the temples, and they matter for size as well, because a monastery covers far more ground than the temple at its centre.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. About half of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size. Whether a mapper traced an outline is mostly a matter of how thoroughly the area was mapped. We draw temples as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about half as wide again, because the monasteries and religious plots around them cover far more ground and would otherwise crowd the temples out. The largest site is an imperial tomb complex in China covering tens of square kilometres, and we cap the size scale well below it.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a temple there, not that nobody practises there. Mapping is dense in Japan, Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka, and where a temple stands in most villages that density is real. In some places the tagging moves sites off this map rather than the mapping missing them. Many Vietnamese sites are recorded as folk or Taoist rather than Buddhist, so they appear on other maps and this one looks thinner over Vietnam than practice would suggest.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A site shown here may have closed or changed use, and the building usually stands for years afterwards.

Source and licence

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