Towards a regional empirical framework: spatial perspectives in Chinese Buddhist temple garden research

Buddhist temple gardens are widespread across Asia, combining sacred precincts, everyday settings, and public interfaces. Taking a spatial perspective, this study synthesizes cross-disciplinary developments spatial theory and their application to temple garden scholarship. It believes that temple gardens are not ancillary greens attached to buildings but social-spatial systems through state regulation, monastic practice, and daily use of space. Using systematic field surveys and remote-sensing interpretation cross-checked with archival sources in the Lingnan region of China, we identify more than 1,060 temples. These sites cluster along river and coastal networks and historic trade routes, reflecting geostrategic siting, commercial growth, and cultural exchange. Existing Lingnan scholarship has accumulated mainly in temple architecture, garden space, and architectural heritage conservation, and it is increasingly shifting the field from stylistic description toward integrated analyses of spatial production mechanisms, regional adaptability, and social interaction functions. Building on this evidence, the paper proposes a triadic framework – material, social, and affective spaces – with comparable indicators, data standards, and multi-scale analytic paths to support value assessment, conservation and renewal, and spatial governance. Lingnan serves as the empirical anchor, but the framework and findings speak to temple gardens across Asia.