Xie shanshui jue 寫山水訣

Xie shanshui jue 寫山水訣 "Formulas for painting landscapes", also called Chini huajue 大癡畫訣, is a short text on landscape painting written during the Yuan period 元 (1279-1368) by Huang Gongwang 黃公望 (1269-1355), courtesy name Zijiu 子久, style Yifeng 一峰 or Dachi Daoren 大癡道人, from Changshu 常熟, Jiangsu. His original name was Lu Jian 陸堅, but he changed this name in honour to the family Huang 黃氏 of Yongjia 永嘉. Huang occupied the post of investigation commissioner (lianfangshi 廉訪使) of the circuit of Zhe-Xi 浙西. He was inspired by the artworks of Dong Yuan 董源 (d. 962) and Juran 巨然 (10th cent.), but developed his own, exceptional style.

His short book discusses skills in the depicting of mountains and trees, with a focus on the need of expressing the particular "spirit" of trees. Huang approaches this issue from the density of colour. Light, watery ink was used to paint mountains with their many edgy rocks, by applying strength to the brush. For structures and wrinkles (cunran 皴染), intense colour was necessary, but a weaker use of the brush. This technique had a great influence on later ages. Concerning distance in landscape painting, three different layers of distance (sanyuan 三遠) are explained, namely horizontal distance (pingyuan 平遠), "wide distance" (kuoyuan 闊遠), and vertical distance (gaoyuan 高遠).

The text in included in the series Hualong congkan 畫論叢刊, but it is also quoted in Tao Zongyi's 陶宗儀 (1322-1403) Chuogenglu 輟耕錄, the Peiwenzhai shuhua pu 佩文齋書畫譜, and the early Qing-period 清 (1644-1911) encylcopaedia Gujin tushu jicheng 古今圖書集成, as well as in Huang Jiazhu's 黃嘉柱 Yifeng Daoren ji 一峰道人遺集, and Xu Wenqing's 徐文清 Qingshouge duhua shiba zhong 清瘦閤讀畫十八種.