This article explains why the magazine adopts the term “mountain and water painting”, a literal rendering of shanshui hua, instead of “landscape painting”. The author argues that the European notion of landscape, which emerged around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, designates a portion of land contemplated from outside and is bound to the laws of sight and focal perspective; such works tend to be static, estrange the viewer from the scene and subordinate representation to optics. Chinese painting theory, by contrast, treated single-point vision as a limitation from its earliest texts. Drawing on Zong Bing, Wang Wei, Guo Xi, Han Zhuo, Shen Kuo and Su Dongpo, the article surveys the “six distances”, observation “step by step” (bubu youjing), viewing “the big through the small”, and the selection and omission of elements, showing how painters combined multiple viewpoints acquired through long experience of mountain environments. Wang Ximeng’s handscroll A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains is analysed as an example of these methods working together. The author concludes that, because shanshui painting never aimed at form likeness and frees nature from an anthropocentric gaze, “landscape” is an inadequate translation.