Taoist sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Taoist temples and the grounds they stand in lead this map, followed by roadside shrines, burial sites, offices and a small number of monasteries. There are more than 9,000 sites worldwide. Colour represents which kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents its footprint. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every site here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a temple they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any temple register.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `taoist`. No building type counts as Taoist on its own. Among features tagged `building=temple` that also state a religion, roughly a third are Buddhist and a quarter Hindu, so reading that tag as Taoist would put thousands of other religions' temples on this map.

Chinese folk religion, Confucianism and Vietnamese folk religion are not folded in. Each has a value of its own in OpenStreetMap, and merging them into Taoist would draw a boundary that the traditions themselves do not draw.

Colour

Colour represents the kind of site rather than the religion, because the religion is the whole map. More than 90% of the dots are places of worship, so most of this map is temples. The rest are grounds mapped as their own plot, markers, most of them earth-god shrines by the roadside, then burial sites, offices, former sites and a fallback class for religious buildings. Three kinds hold single figures each, and we show them rather than hide them.

Ancestral halls and tombs

Ancestral halls and family tombs stand in enormous numbers across the Chinese-speaking world, and almost none of them are here. OpenStreetMap has no established tag for an ancestral hall, and ancestor veneration is recorded as a religion in its own right rather than as Taoist. That is much of why the burial row in the legend is nearly empty. The gap is in what has been recorded, and religious practice in the region does not divide the way the tagging vocabulary assumes.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. About a third of these sites are mapped as a point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for a third of this map the size of a dot is not telling you how large the site is.

We draw temples as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about 1.4 times as wide. A temple is a building and a cemetery complex is a hillside, and without the weighting the sites this map is about were consistently the smallest marks on it. Even with it, the largest dots here are Malaysian cemetery complexes covering more than a square kilometre rather than the best known temples.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a temple there, not that no temple stands there. Taiwan is mapped in great detail by an active local community, and mapping across mainland China is far thinner, so a dense patch here means a well-mapped place first and a Taoist one second. Malaysia's temples are mapped by a diaspora community and are probably close to complete. We can't correct for any of this, because there is no independent count of temples to correct against.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A temple that has been rebuilt or has changed use may keep its old record until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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