Place Entities

Reading the Place layer

Places anchor the Atlas in geography. A place entity is a region, mountain, river, or settlement whose conditions — latitude, altitude, water, soil — produce a recognisable seasonal pattern. The Atlas includes places because seasonal knowledge is always local: the same solar term means different things in Jiangnan and in the Qinling range, and a practice that works in one valley may not transfer to the next without being rebuilt from the ground up.

Place pages connect to the plants and ingredients that grow there, the festivals celebrated there, and the people who write about it. They are also where the Atlas is most explicit about its own limits: entries describe a specific tradition's relationship to a specific landscape, and following the links outward shows how far that tradition travels before the conditions change enough to make it something else.