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Daoist Sacred Sites & HeritageSacred Sites & Heritage · 562 entries

Grotto-Heavens and Blessed Lands, the Five Marchmounts and the four great Daoist mountains, historic temples and ancestral seats, cave sculpture, steles and murals, ruins and museums, plus temples in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and overseas. Entries with coordinates appear on the map; filter by type, region or school.

The survey layer shows Daoist and Chinese folk-religion sites in mainland China mapped by the OpenStreetMap community (2,777 points with names and coordinates). These are map points only, without articles, and are kept distinct from this site's curated entries. According to the State Council Information Office white paper China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief (April 2018), mainland China has over 9,000 officially registered Daoist temples and more than 40,000 ordained clergy; that register, however, is not published in full (names and addresses are not publicly released). This layer is therefore not an official registry but the most complete open dataset currently available, covering roughly one third of the registered total.

The Taiwan layer comes from the public registry of the Ministry of the Interior's Department of Religious and Ceremonial Affairs: 12,422 total records, of which 9,816 are officially classified as Daoist. Of those, 9,405 have valid coordinates and are mapped; 411 with missing or invalid coordinates are omitted. This is the 2026-08-15 snapshot, retrieved and verified through an independent daily archive. Official dataset ↗

The mainland registry layer is compiled from the National Religious Affairs Administration public query system: 8,351 Daoist venues (Zhengyi 4,338 · Quanzhen 4,013), which together with the system’s 34,090 Buddhist venues exactly matches its 42,441 total. The records carry street addresses but no coordinates, so this site locates them offline against OpenStreetMap administrative centroids: 3,278 resolve to township level (roughly 5–10 km), 4,883 only to county level (roughly 20–30 km). The layer is therefore drawn as proportional circles aggregated by administrative unit — each circle sits at an administrative centroid, not at a temple’s actual location, and expands to list the venues within it. This is deliberate: pins would fake a precision the data does not have. Circle colour follows the lineage mix — redder for predominantly Zhengyi, greener for predominantly Quanzhen.

The Xuanwu layer merges three sources. Taiwan entries are identified from the Ministry of the Interior registry’s "principal deity" field (Xuantian Shangdi is Taiwan’s third most common principal deity); mainland and overseas entries can only be matched by temple name, since no deity field exists, and are therefore certainly undercounted (many Zhenwu temples are named Zushi Dian, Xuandi Gong or Shangdi Miao). Homonymous but distinct deities — Xietian Shangdi (Guan Yu), Baosheng Shangdi (Wu Ben), Yuhuang Shangdi (the Jade Emperor) — are excluded. The turtle-and-snake is Xuanwu’s own form: Wang Yi’s commentary on the Chuci glosses "Xuanwu means turtle and snake."

Sources for curated entries appear on their article pages. Mainland survey layer © OpenStreetMap (ODbL). The Taiwan registry layer is used under Taiwan's Open Government Data License 1.0. Defer to official local information for coordinates.

Shandong 10

Shaanxi 14

Hunan 5

Shanxi 12

Hebei 6

Henan 15

Hubei 10

Jiangxi 10

Sichuan 13

Anhui 4

Jiangsu 9

Guangdong 7

Zhejiang 5

Liaoning 5

Beijing 7

Tianjin 1

Shanghai 4

Fujian 4

Guangxi 3

Chongqing 2

Gansu 3

Qinghai 1

Xinjiang 1

Ningxia 1

Jilin 1

Heilongjiang 1

Inner Mongolia 1

Yunnan 3

Guizhou 1

Hainan 1

Grotto-Heavens and Blessed Lands 118

Overseas · Hong Kong, China 15

Overseas · Macau, China 7

Overseas · Taiwan, China 26

Overseas · Japan 9

Overseas · South Korea 3

Overseas · Singapore 17

Overseas · Malaysia 31

Overseas · Vietnam 6

Overseas · Philippines 3

Overseas · United States 52

Overseas · Canada 3

Overseas · Australia 20

Overseas · Italy 2

Overseas · United Kingdom 2

Overseas · France 2

Overseas · Spain 1

Overseas · Germany 1

Overseas · Switzerland 1

Overseas · Portugal 1

Overseas · Slovenia 1

Overseas · Russia 1

Overseas · Belgium 1

Overseas · Brazil 1

Overseas · Peru 1

Overseas · Mauritius 4

Overseas · Indonesia 25

Overseas · Thailand 7

Overseas · New Zealand 4

Overseas · French Polynesia 1

Overseas · Fiji 1

Overseas · Cuba 4

Overseas · Mexico 4

Overseas · Panama 2

Overseas · Jamaica 2

Overseas · Suriname 1

Overseas · Argentina 1

Overseas · France (Réunion) 3

Overseas · Madagascar 1

Overseas · South Africa 2

Overseas · India 15