Nanyang Sites GIS Data

This project, funded by the Haoran Foundation 浩然基金會, was conducted at the Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts 法鼓文理學院 2008-2010. The project is hosted at: https://buddhistinformatics.dila.edu.tw/taiwanbudgis/. The csv and yaml of this Nanyang-temples data layer includes only the 5059 Buddhist temples that were active in 2010. There are another ca. 500 historical temples that were discontinued or moved. The full data with additional text and descriptions is in the TEI/XML-file, which is the original distributable of the project that could be found at the original project website.

This layer is the result of a FROGBEAR workshop titled "Space and Cyberspace - Using GIS in the Study of East Asian Religion", that took place June 2017 at Dharma Drum. The images taken during the survey are archived at the Frogbear Database of Religious Sites in East Asia. The csv and yaml of this Nanyang-temples data layer include 147 religious sites in the districts of Jinshan 金山 and Shimen 石門 districts in northeast Taiwan. All sites were visited and documented by one of three teams:

• Team 1: Anderl, Christoph; Shen, Lien Fan; Burdorf, Suzanne; Yan, Weiguang 闫伟光
• Team 2: Lin, Peiying 林佩瑩; Buckelew, Kevin; Seymour, Kelsey; Wu, Jinhui
• Team 3: Chang, Pi-chun 張碧君; Travis, Travis N.; Chong, Eng Keat William; Li, Xinlu 李昕璐

The workshop was taught and organized by Simon Wiles, Oliver Streiter, Jenjou Hung 洪振洲, and Marcus Bingenheimer.

Starting out as a follow-up study of W. Franke's documentation of Chinese Epigraphy in Bangkok, this survey maps more than 170 Chinese temple sites. It does not include small roadside shrines. The vast majority of the temples are freestanding buildings with doors and opening hours. The survey builds on previous lists. However, none of these were geo-referenced nor did they (with the exception of Duan 1996) include Chinese characters. The survey was done 2022-2023.

The dataset contains 358 locations of c. 170 institutions. Chinese associations or Huiguan 會館 were important institutions for overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. The survey contains past as well as present locations until 2016.

This dataset contains 834 locations of temples in Singapore that were presumed active in 2017. The vast majority of the sites are Chinese temples dedicated to Daoist or Buddhist deities. Shrines in "united temples" appear as individual entries. A few Tibetan and Theravādin Buddhist temples or centers are included as well. The data was collected 2005-2017 by Kenneth Dean, Guan Thye Hue, and their team. On united temples see Hue et al. 2022 (https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13070602).

The dataset contains the locations of c. 53 Keramat shrines, past and present. The data was extracted from "A Complete Catalog of Keramat in Singapore" by William L. Gibson, 2022. The full catalog is available at https://www.academia.edu/88697484/Complete_Catalog_of_Keramat_in_Singapore (2024-07-13). A detailed study of keramat by Dr. Gibson is also available from Routledge as Keramat, Sacred Relics and Forbidden Idols in Singapore ISBN 9781032785882. The data was extracted by Fei Wu and Junlin Wang under supervision of Kenneth Dean and MB.

This survey maps more than 30 Chinese temple sites on Bintan, the largest island of the Riau Archipelago. The survey was conducted in Spring 2024.

The eminent sinologist Wolfgang Franke (1912-2007) has published three collections of Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand). In 2024 Kenneth Dean, Marcus Bingenheimer and a team of graduate students (Wang Junlin, Wu Fei a.o.) at the National University of Singapore identified and, where possible, geo-referenced the still extant sites that Franke visited for his survey. Chinese epigraphic materials in Indonesia collected, annotated, and edited by Wolfgang Franke, in collaboration with Claudine Salmon and Anthony Siu, with the assistance of Hu Juyun and Teo Lee Kheng. 1988-1997. Singapore: South Seas Society Nanyang Xuehui, 3 vols (Vol. 1: 1988, Vol. 2-1: 1997, Vol 2-2: 1997). This layer lists all 454 sites and assigns nanyang site IDs. We were able to geo-reference only 261 of these with the help of online tools. Especially the many grave sites listed by Franke are often impossible to find with the methods at our disposal. Each entry includes a current address (where known) and the date of the earliest inscription (according to Franke) which is usually an indication of the age of the site.