The chart is an interactive lineage map. Shanshui sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.

For Shanshui (5th Century – Present), no earlier influence is recorded for it; it fans out to four movements it went on to influence, all well-established links: Northern landscape style, Qinglü shanshui, the Southern School and the Zhe school.