This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
After losing its Uyghur state patron in 840 CE, Manichaeism survived underground in China's southeastern provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, its adherents disguising the faith as a Buddhist vegetarian sect to avoid detection, and it continued to rival Buddhism in influence among the scattered Uyghurs into the thirteenth century, outliving by hundreds of years the empire that had briefly made it a state religion.
Ming dynasty China formally banned the religion in 1370, closing off even the disguised, underground existence the faith had managed to maintain for five centuries since the Uyghur Khaganate's fall. Continued persecution under the Ming and Qing dynasties that followed did not eliminate the faith in a single stroke, instead it gradually absorbed what remained of Manichaeism into Buddhism and Taoism, the same two traditions its own missionaries had once tried to fold into a single universal message.
The temple of Cao'an in Jinjiang, Fujian, survives today as the last physical trace of a faith that once had an empire for a patron, a single structure standing where a religion that had crossed from Babylonia to Persia, Rome and Central Asia finally ran out of ground to occupy.
What thirteen centuries of history changed for Manichaeism's spread was its ending. A religion carried from Babylonia to Persian royal favor, into the Roman Empire, underground through repeated persecution, and finally into an empire of its own in Central Asia had, by the time the Ming ban took effect, nowhere left to survive as itself, only as a disguise worn inside the faiths that outlasted it.