Mawangdui was never a temple, a shrine or a site of pilgrimage, and nothing about its selection as a burial ground marked it out religiously beforehand; it earns its place in the atlas because of what its silence preserved rather than because of any cult once conducted there. The tomb belonged to Li Cang, chancellor to the kingdom of Changsha under the early Han, his wife, and probably their son, and the goods buried with them, lacquerware, silk garments, a genuine physical library, were provisions for the afterlife rather than instruments of worship at the grave itself. What makes the location significant to the history of religion is that the sealed environment acted as an accidental archive: the manuscripts it protected are now central to how scholars reconstruct the early textual history of Taoism and of the Yijing's divinatory tradition, disciplines that continued to develop for two thousand years without knowing that an older, different version of their own founding texts was sitting undisturbed outside Changsha.
The Hunan Museum, which now holds both the manuscripts and the remarkably preserved body of the marquis' wife, functions as the site's effective custodian, and the original tomb mounds themselves remain at the excavation site as a protected archaeological area rather than as an active place of devotion. The atlas lists Mawangdui as a sacred site in this narrower, textual sense: the ground that kept a scripture's earlier reading intact.