Chinese religious life is famously plural: the same family may honor its ancestors at the domestic altar, consult a Taoist priest for a funeral, pray to Guanyin for a child and send that child to school on Confucian maxims, without any sense of contradiction. Ancestor veneration is the oldest continuous thread, already visible in the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang kings, who divined by cracking bones and turtle shells addressed to royal ancestors. Confucius made the family cult a school of virtue, ordering society through li, ritual propriety, and filial piety; Taoism grew from the Tao Te Ching's vision of the way into an organized religion of priesthoods, liturgies and inner cultivation; and Buddhism, arriving over the Silk Road, became thoroughly Chinese, nowhere more than in the transformation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara into the beloved lady Guanyin.
Beneath and around the three teachings lives the folk religion of the majority: the Jade Emperor presiding over a celestial bureaucracy that mirrors the imperial one, city gods and earth gods administering their districts, the stove god reporting on each family at New Year, Mazu guarding sailors, Guan Yu embodying loyalty, and Caishen bringing wealth. The dead are provided for with offerings and paper goods, and the unquiet dead are fed at the Ghost Festival, when the gates of the underworld, Diyu, stand open.
Popular narrative carries the theology: Pangu separating heaven and earth, Nuwa mending the sky, and the Monkey King's rebellion against heaven in Journey to the West.