This article clarifies the definition of the term “blue-green mountain and water” (qinglü shanshui) at a time when the study of coloured landscape painting has become increasingly active, stimulated by exhibitions such as the Palace Museum’s 2017 blue-green landscape exhibition. The author notes that many terms for coloured landscape coexist, including zhuose, jinbi, qinglü, da qinglü, xiao qinglü and qianjiang, without clear benchmarks. Tracing their history, he shows that early treatises use terms such as danqing and zhuose simply to mean “colour painting”, while jinbi (gold and jade-green) was the first term for a specific landscape type, codified in Rao Ziran’s Yuan-dynasty Twelve Taboos of Painting. Rao’s distinction between “light” and “heavy” colouring corresponds to materials: transparent vegetable dyes and clay pigments versus mineral pigments such as stone green and stone blue, with gold added in jinbi. The term qinglü appeared in the late Southern Song but became established only after the Ming; “small blue-green” seems a modern coinage; and qianjiang became fixed from the mid-Ming through Huang Gongwang’s legacy and the Mustard Seed Garden Manual. The author concludes that pigment material is a key criterion, pending future scientific analysis.