If you’ve seen only ash-aired Beijing, or that architectural Oz, Shanghai, you haven’t seen China. Most of the country is wide-open space, green and blue: hills, plains, water. And it was an escape to that openness that some Chinese urbanites — clerks pinned to desks, scholar-officials swimming in a shark-tank imperial court — yearned for in centuries past. Their dream was to sit in on a terrace halfway up a mountain, with tea steeping, an ink-brush at hand, a friend at the door and a waterfall splashing nearby. Not just for vacation. Forever.

One way they could live the dream was through images of the kind seen in “Streams and Mountains Without End: Landscape Traditions of China” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show, in the Chinese paintings and calligraphy galleries, is technically a collection reinstallation spiced with a few loans. But the Met’s China holdings are so broad and deep that some of the pictures here are resurfacing for the first time in almost a decade; one is finally making its debut a century after it was acquired. And there’s more than just painting on view.

A longing for the natural world, or some version of it, real or ideal, saturated Chinese elite culture. Images of it turned up everywhere — on porcelain vases, cloisonné bowls, silk robes and jade sculptures. The most effective medium for imaginatively entering a landscape, though, was painting, and specifically in two forms, the hanging scroll and the hand scroll, both traditionally done in ink on silk.