Between 1966 and 1976 organised religious life in China effectively ceased in public. Places of worship of every tradition were closed or put to other uses, clergy and monastics were required to return to lay life or were sent to labour, and religious associations that had operated under state supervision since the 1950s stopped functioning.
Fenggang Yang's study of religion in China under Communist rule treats the decade as the extreme point of a longer policy rather than as an isolated episode, since the institutional space available to religion had already been progressively narrowed in the preceding fifteen years. The campaign against what it called the four olds directed action at temples, monasteries, mosques, churches, images, texts and graves.
Buddhist and Daoist monasteries, Confucian temples including the Kong family complex at Qufu, Christian congregations, mosques in the northwest and the monasteries of Tibet were all affected, and the destruction of buildings was accompanied by the destruction of libraries, archives, images and ritual objects. Some sites were protected by local decision or by military order and survived; many did not. The atlas records the period as documented in the scholarly literature and does not extend beyond what that literature establishes.