A course exploring the aesthetics of nature from the perspectives of medieval China and the European romantic era. Students will be guided through the history of the appearance of the sublime in the Western romanticism, and the emergence of the mountains and waters (山水) aesthetics in medieval China. This will not only allow students to consider the similarities and differences between the emergence of two traditions of nature writing but moreover consider how and why civilizations can simultaneously develop contradictory notions of ecological conservation and natural resource exploitation.