The domestic altar is the base layer of Chinese religion and it is not specifically Taoist — it is simply what a household does. A shelf or cabinet holds images or name-plaques of the household gods, commonly Guanyin, Guandi, the Earth God and Mazu depending on region and trade, alongside the ancestral tablets bearing the names of the family dead. Three sticks of incense are offered in the morning; tea, fruit, and on special days cooked food are set out; the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month get fuller offerings. What makes this layer important historically is its invisibility. Through the Cultural Revolution, when temples were destroyed, images smashed and clergy forced into secular life, the practices that survived best were the ones conducted inside a kitchen with the door shut, and the revival from the 1980s onward drew heavily on what households had quietly continued.