River Crossings at the Yangtze’s Headwaters: Mapping Hydrosocial Mobility Infrastructures across the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

This article investigates river crossing spaces and practices as key features of past and present human-river relationships along the fluvial landscapes of today’s Three-River-Source (TRS or sanjiangyuan ) region of the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau (QTP), which includes the sources of the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong Rivers. Through an ethnographically informed analysis of Western travel literature about the Sino-Tibetan borderlands (1850–1950), this study contributes to the environmental history of the QTP by mapping the main pre-1950s river crossings within the Yangtze’s headwaters region and examining how they inform contemporary state-led infrastructural and heritagization processes. This essay draws on critical infrastructure and hydrosocial theory to present river crossings as “hydrosocial mobility infrastructures” (HMIs) enabling connectivity within the wider system of historical trade routes linking China and Tibet in the headwaters region. The HMI framework highlights the ecological and relational character of pre-1950s river crossings, which are shaped by human and non-human interactions, local ecological knowledge, overlapping authorities, and frontier geopolitics, as well as by hydrological, geomorphic, and seasonal changes.