Mapping the Sacred
Every religious site in the 2022 survey on one map, the landscape and ecology around them, the density of records by district, and the moving shoreline.
Atlas of all religious sites
All 2,657 religious places in the 2022 OSAGE-HK survey, from Protestant congregations on upper floors to Buddhist monasteries on Lantau. Filter by religion, district, floor or heritage status, search by name or address, change the colouring and base map, and download the rows on screen.
Sacred landscapes and ecological setting
Ninety-four denominational labels sit beneath the atlas's religion categories, and they do not distribute evenly. A permutation test of which religions share the same 300-metre neighbourhoods more often than their district-level counts predict shows Hinduism, Islam and the New Age movement clustering together, Buddhism and Catholicism keeping apart, and Protestant and Catholic sites avoiding each other more than chance would suggest.
Inner ring: the atlas's religion labels (its "Other Religion" category unpacked). Outer ring: 94 denominational labels. Click a segment to zoom; click the centre to return.
Observed pairs within 300 m, divided by the expectation from 200 shuffles of religion labels within districts. Above one means more mixing than chance.
Reading key: each cell is the ratio of observed to expected pairs within 300 m. Warm cells mean more mixing than chance, cool cells less.
Where records concentrate — and where coverage differs
Counting sites by district rewards the districts with the most people. The 2021 Population Census publishes its results for 211 small areas, the Street Blocks and Tertiary Planning Unit Groups, with boundaries on the Common Spatial Data Infrastructure portal. Placing every atlas point inside its census area gives a denominator. The territory-wide rate is 3.6 sites per 10,000 residents; the median small area has 2.7; the old core of Yau Ma Tei and Jordan, Sheung Wan and Sai Ying Pun, and Tsim Sha Tsui all exceed 20, while several large public housing estates with more than ten thousand residents have no site at all. Across 196 areas with at least 3,000 residents, the rate is uncorrelated with median monthly earnings and weakly correlated with the share of residents who are not ethnically Chinese, which reflects the mosques, gurdwaras, Filipino and Indonesian congregations and expatriate churches of the old urban core rather than any general rule.
Each circle is a census small area with at least 3,000 residents, sized by population. The vertical axis is atlas sites per 10,000 residents; choose the horizontal variable. Hover for the area.
Moving Shoreline
Tin Hau temples were built at the water's edge, for a goddess of the sea, by fishing and trading communities who landed in front of them. Hong Kong's mapped shoreline has since changed through reclamation. This comparison places 58 of the 124 Tin Hau temples listed for the territory against five historic coastlines redrawn from Admiralty charts and government surveys of 1845, 1888, 1904 and 1924, and against the 2004 coast. Across these 58 mapped points, the median distance to shore is 71 m in 1845 and 120.5 m in 2004; for fourteen points, the 2004 coast is more than 150 m farther from the temple point than the 1845 coast. The Yau Ma Tei temple point lies 32 m from the 1845 shoreline and 1,073 m from the 2004 line; its record gives no move year, so this comparison makes no claim that the temple moved or that worship changed. The Tai Wo Hau point lies 309 m from the 1845 line and 1,781 m from the 2004 line. The coastlines shown cover only stretches later reclaimed; they show mapped shoreline change, not the history or present use of each temple.
Each line is one temple; the vertical axis is the straight-line distance from the temple to the nearest coast in that survey year, on a logarithmic scale. Lines that climb are temples the reclamations left behind. Hover a line for the temple; the labelled lines are the largest shifts.