What is the Chinese painting style using brilliant mineral blue and green pigments called?

The Chinese painting style using brilliant mineral blue and green pigments is called blue-green landscape.

Known in Chinese as qinglü shanshui, the style developed from early landscape traditions and became especially prominent in court painting. Artists used mineral azurite for blue and malachite for green, producing colors that could remain vivid for centuries when carefully applied.

A famous example is Wang Ximeng’s A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, painted in 1113. Blue-green landscapes often present mountains and rivers as idealized, orderly worlds rather than as direct records of one visible location.

The style differs from ink-wash painting, which emphasizes tonal variation in black ink, and from gongbi, a precise brushwork method that may use many different color schemes. Shan shui means “mountain-water” and describes a broader landscape genre.