The ‘Danxia landscape’ has been studied for nearly a century, ever since Professor Feng Jinglan first proposed the concept of ‘Danxia layer’ and described its associated landforms in 1927. The way to define ‘Danxia landscape’ has long been much discussed, based on its rock colors, geomorphic shapes, depositional structures, ancient depositional environment, cementing materials and geological structures that shaped the landforms. More than twenty different definitions have so far been proposed (Wang et al. 2020; Peng 2020a, b; Guo et al. 2020).