This article asks how far Chinese painting, a tradition the author describes as fully committed to abstraction, can also be concrete. It first outlines the principles of abstraction in Chinese art: the Daoist and Buddhist identification of essence with emptiness, the interplay of form and void, the xieyi ideal formulated in Su Dongpo’s circle, the canonised models of manuals such as the Mustard Seed Garden, and the rise of monochrome ink. It then turns to one of the few early works depicting a real landscape, the Mountain Villa Scroll by the eleventh-century literati painter Li Gonglin, who lived for nearly ten years in the Longmian Mountains near his hometown of Shucheng, Anhui. In 2015 the author carried out field research in Longmianshan, comparing sections of the scroll’s Beijing, Taipei and Florence versions with the actual terrain. He identifies plausible counterparts for Magpie Stream, Precious Blossom Cliff, the Cave of Extending Blossoms (today Moyuan Cave) and Lingling Valley, and proposes an approximate location for the villa. He concludes that the scroll is based on real places but strongly abstracted, confirming Su Dongpo’s view that Li grasped the essence rather than the map of the landscape.