Acknowledgments
This atlas is the result of a collaborative effort by researchers and student assistants at the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University. The initial effort to process and clean the data started in 2010, and several graduate students were involved in the process, including Fan Jiang, Miao Li, Jun Lu, and Zhongqiao Mi. In 2011 and 2013, working in collaboration with George Hong at the Purdue University at Calumet and Shuming Bao of the China Data Center at the University of Michigan, we received two grants from the Henry Luce Foundation for cleaning, processing, and analyzing the data. These grants enabled us to process the data and explore spatial studies.
In 2015, we received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation for a large project with multiple components, including mapping religions in China and producing this atlas. Our team at the Center on Religion and Chinese Society produced all the maps, figures, and tables in the book. The process of finding coordinates for the religious sites and creating distribution maps at the national, prefectural, and county levels was a particularly difficult task. Our team was blessed to draw upon the expertise of computer scientists, engineers, and sociologists. In particular, Charles Chang, Jackie Henke, Yuki Huang, Ke Liu, Yun Lu, Joey Marshall, and Yunping Tong deserve much credit in producing such a beautiful work of art and research. All of these individuals also contributed to the research and writing of the various parts of this book. Naila Althagafi, Xinyi Zhao, and Jiayin Hu made important contributions to the sections on Islam and black-market religions.
In addition to our students, we also had three postdoctoral researchers, Charles Chang, Luke Chao, and Ting Guo, who worked extensively on the survey data and religious events in provinces. Jonathan Pettit played a major role in helping to lead the team in the whole project. Many individuals have contributed substantial feedback and assistance in the making of this book: Merrick Lex Berman, David Bodenhamer, Peter Bol, Zhe Ji, Sorin Matei, Gordon Melton, Jie Shan, Anna Sun, Jianping Wang, Yuting Wang, Jiang Wu, Ying Xie, and Xiaohong Zhu. Of course, all the remaining errors and mistakes are my responsibility.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks to the John Templeton Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Sociology at Purdue University. This book would not have been possible without their generous and continuous support.
Fenggang Yang
Center on Religion and Chinese Society