Taoist sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Taoist site of any kind recorded in OpenStreetMap — temples, the grounds they stand in, roadside shrines, burial sites, offices and the occasional monastery. Just over 9,400 worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by footprint area and coloured by what kind of site it is. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the building's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

This is the companion to the places of worship map, which colours every religion's places of worship by religion. This one takes a single religion and shows everything of it that is mapped.

Click any site to see what OpenStreetMap records about it. Where the site has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every site links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

The most important thing on this page

Taiwan holds more than twice China's count, on about one-sixtieth of its population.

Taiwan is 58.4% of this map and China 26.4%. That is an OpenStreetMap coverage difference, not a fact about Taoism. Taiwan is mapped in great detail by an active local community; mainland China is mapped far more thinly. A reader taking the map at face value would conclude that Taoism is principally Taiwanese, which it is not.

Malaysia's 9.6% is a third pattern again — diaspora temple-building, and probably close to complete.

So a dense patch on this map means a well-mapped place first and a Taoist one second. We cannot correct for this, because there is no independent count of Chinese temples to correct against, so the distortion is stated rather than silently smoothed.

What is not on this map

Ancestral tombs and ancestral halls exist in enormous numbers across the Chinese-speaking world, and almost none of them are here. They are simply not tagged as Taoist in OpenStreetMap — there is no established tag for an ancestral hall at all, and "ancestor" is recorded as a separate religion, which appears on the map of other religions.

This is why the burial and monastery rows in the legend are nearly empty. Those are not gaps in our processing; they are gaps in what has been recorded, and the shape of Chinese religious practice does not divide the way the tagging vocabulary assumes.

Chinese folk religion, Confucianism and Vietnamese folk religion are also not folded in here. Each is a distinct tradition with its own value in OpenStreetMap, and merging them into "Taoist" would draw a boundary that the traditions themselves do not. They appear on the map of other religions.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is, not which religion — the religion is the whole map. Ten kinds appear:

Place of worship — the temple itself. 93.3% of this map, the highest concentration of any of these religion maps.
Grounds — the plot mapped as its own polygon rather than the building.
Marker — roadside shrines, most of them earth-god shrines.
Burial site, office, religious building, former site — each small.
School, monastery, community building — each in single figures.

The last three are shown rather than hidden because they exist, but a legend row of one site is a row you will struggle to find on the map. That is the honest state of the data.

Which sites count as Taoist

A site is on this map when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `taoist`. No building type is taken as implying Taoism on its own: `building=temple` is roughly a third Buddhist and a quarter Hindu among the sites that state a religion, so treating an untagged temple as Taoist would put thousands of other religions' temples on this map. Only what the mapper actually stated counts.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

About 36% of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline. Rather than draw them all at the smallest size, they are given a nominal, typical size. Whether a site is mapped as a point or an outline is mostly a matter of how thoroughly it was mapped, not of how large it stands.

Temples are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, and the only one on the map. A temple is a building; a cemetery complex is a hillside. Without it the sites the map is about were consistently the smallest marks on it. The weighting is small enough to leave the real order intact.

Footprint is physical extent, not importance. Even with the weighting above, the largest symbols on this map are Malaysian cemetery complexes covering more than a square kilometre, not the most significant temples.

Sites with no name

86% of the sites here carry a name — the highest share of the religion maps — and the unnamed ones are shown just the same.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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