JodiExists

Here’s the general art style Chinese mountains are drawn in:

And here’s how some of them actually look:

Image 1 is a photograph showing a stereotypical landscape of rolling hills and mountains. The foreground is dominated by a forest of green trees, while the gentle peaks and valleys beyond recede into misty shades of blue that lighten progressively before they merge with the pale sky in the background. Even though it is fairly mountainous, the predominant axial expression is horizontal.

Image 2 is a Chinese landscape painting. The foreground is dominated by a grove of bamboo, some of whose foliage droops over the middle ground consisting of a placid waterway with a narrow fishing boat and birds in flight above it. The background shows narrow mountains rising vertically from a thick mist that obscures the water’s edge. The mountains have steep, almost vertical sides, and their peaks are blunt. The space between two neighbouring mountain faces is less than the height of the mountains themselves. Vegetation on the mountains is sparse, tending to be on the tops of peaks and crags, with the steeper mountain faces appearing to be bare rock. Although the waterway and the slim boat express horizontality, the mountains in the rear and the bamboo in the front express starkly contrasting verticality instead.

Image 3 is a photograph of a karst landscape consisting of geological formations, tall as mountains, that are narrow and closely spaced with steep (almost vertical sides). There is more bare rock than vegetation, which is confined to the more horizontally-inclined surfaces such as the flattened peaks and the tops of cliff faces.

Image 4 is a screenshot of Tumblr tags that read:

#its because theyre not technically mountains! theyre karsts #a karst is made when rocks like limestone are eroded by water over time into weird shaped like these ones here! #sediment rocks are laid down and then pushed up from the seabed through tectonic force and get worn down into these shapes over time :)