Of the entire Chinese landscape, mingshan, or famous mountains--mountains that had came to be canonized through imperial or literati patronage, or as a result of being chosen as sites for important Daoist, Buddhist or Neo-Confucian institutions--command our attention not so much because of their physical elevation as because of their cultural significance as nodes where important ideas converged and accumulated and sites where different ideological structures attempted to incorporate, inscribe and appropriate. The connotations of famous mountains changed over time, in different contexts and according to various audiences, so did the relevance, functions, or implications of their pictorial representations. This study of the famous mountain paintings in the oeuvre of three professional artists active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the urban centers of Nanjing, Suzhou and Songjiang reveals that the surge in the production of paintings of these subjects during this period was to a large extent a response to the rise of the literati vogue of "journeying to famous mountains and great rivers," and that the dominant meanings of these paintings revolved around the theme of real or imaginary travel.

Chapter One traces the evolution of the meanings of the term mingshan through different ages and surveys briefly the recorded or extant examples of famous mountain paintings dated prior to the Ming. Chapter Two examines the phenomenon of the vogue of literati travel from the sixteenth century onward and investigates its significance for different participants in this vogue. The first two chapters provide the historical and contemporary cultural backgrounds for the discussions in the following three chapters devoted to the famous mountain paintings by Ye Cheng, Xie Shichen, and Song Xu, each of whom in his own way responded to the vogue of travel and to the increasing demand for paintings of famous mountains. The Conclusion summarizes the general trend in late Ming paintings of famous mountains concluded from the three case studies, which are, in short, the rise of a tourist attitude toward famous mountains, the expression of the expansion of horizon, and the increasing secularization of the connotation of fame.