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Four days after a cross-border landslide disaster struck Gyirong Port in Gyirong County, Xigaze City, in China's Xizang (Tibet) Autonomous Region, Chinese rescue teams are still racing against time in a border gorge nearly 1,800 meters above sea level. On August 30, rescue crews continued pushing to reopen the damaged G216 national highway and search the disaster's core zone, while maintaining close communication and coordination with emergency authorities on the Nepal side — where the landslide originated — on search progress and warnings about secondary hazards. Four days in, the scale of the rescue operation keeps growing, but progress remains difficult given the treacherous terrain, the risk from a newly formed barrier lake, and continuing rain.

According to China's Ministry of Emergency Management, the disaster was triggered when a glacier on the Nepal side of the border suddenly broke apart on the morning of August 26. At around 10:52 a.m. Beijing time, a mass of ice at roughly 5,200 meters above sea level collapsed and, within minutes, plunged to about 4,000 meters, scouring the mountainside and riverbed and sweeping up huge volumes of mud, sand and rock to form a massive, fast-moving debris flow. The flow surged roughly 22 kilometers down the valley before slamming, that same morning, into Gyirong Port on the Chinese side at an elevation of about 1,800 meters, destroying port buildings, roads and border infrastructure within just a few minutes. Rescuers who reached the site afterward described finding "nothing but ruins."

Casualty figures have varied somewhat between reports as the search continues and the toll is updated. Chinese state media cited an official update in the early hours of August 29 saying that, as of 1 a.m. that day, the disaster had killed 7 people and left 554 missing, including roughly 260 foreign nationals — the same set of figures used in an earlier domestic news digest. However, the latest official update, covering conditions as of 6 p.m. on August 29, raised the death toll to 16 and revised the number missing to 546, of whom 261 confirmed missing foreign nationals span 23 countries, including Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nepal, India, South Africa, Ireland, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia. With the search still underway and communications and access in the disaster zone limited, officials stress that these figures remain preliminary and could be revised further.

Efforts to relocate residents and provide medical care have also moved in parallel. As of August 30, 499 local residents from five villages in the at-risk areas of Gyirong and Sale townships had been relocated to safety, while all 555 domestic tourists previously stranded in Gyirong town had been safely evacuated. Mobile medical teams have since given check-ups and treatment to 151 people at the resettlement sites. On supplies, Gyirong town had received 1,122 tents, with armed police from the Xigaze detachment helping to move more than 450 additional tent sets; more than 57,000 pieces of emergency supplies in total — including padded coats, folding beds and bedding — have been delivered to the disaster area. At one temporary settlement roughly 20 kilometers from Gyirong Port, dozens of tents have each been fitted with four beds, along with bedding, lighting and power supply for relocated residents and tourists.

The unusually large number of foreign nationals affected is closely tied to Gyirong Port's location. It sits on the main highway linking Kathmandu, Nepal, with Lhasa, and is one of the principal overland crossings used by foreign tourists and pilgrims traveling to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. According to figures previously released by Xigaze customs, Gyirong Port handled about 4.25 billion yuan in trade in 2024 — nearly 30 percent of total China-Nepal bilateral trade, the largest share of any border crossing between the two countries. The disaster struck as numerous trading caravans, tour groups and pilgrims happened to be passing through or staying in the area, which helps explain the unusually high number of foreign nationals among the missing.

China has continued to scale up its rescue deployment. According to state broadcaster CCTV and other official media, as of August 29 the frontline effort at Gyirong included 1,386 rescue personnel and about 570 pieces of equipment, working on the core-zone search and road-clearing effort. Counting People's Liberation Army troops, armed police, fire and rescue services, public security and border units, and medical teams, the total rescue force mobilized in Xizang has grown to more than 2,000. The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission also dispatched 310 technicians and rescuers from state enterprises including China Anneng Group, bringing about 120 sets of equipment — multifunction detection drones, 3D laser scanners, life-detection devices, and large excavators and loaders. China's national fire and rescue force sent reinforcements from Chengdu, while roughly 50 volunteers from civil rescue groups, including the Xizang Blue Sky Rescue Team and Zhejiang's "Ram Union" team, are also taking part in the frontline search.

The terrain at the disaster site is extremely difficult. Rescuers say the debris deposited by the landslide is as deep as a 20-story building is tall, and search teams have already combed the roughly 40,000-square-meter core search zone twice without finding any new survivors. The G216 national highway is the only road route to the port, and the final kilometer or so of roadbed nearest the port was completely washed away. After several engineering rescue teams worked continuously for days, about 2.5 kilometers of the damaged stretch had been cleared as of August 30, opening the way for heavier machinery and supplies — though the route into the worst-hit core area is still not fully passable.

Secondary hazards have posed another major challenge. The landslide dammed a river to form a barrier lake holding an estimated volume equivalent to about 1,000 Olympic swimming pools, which at one point showed signs of overflowing, forcing Chinese frontline rescue teams and vehicles to retreat to safer ground and prompting Nepali search teams to suspend operations for about 90 minutes. China's water resources authorities later said the lake had been "essentially drained," easing the immediate risk, but rain is forecast for the coming week, and continued rainfall could further destabilize the already fragile slopes upstream, adding uncertainty to both the search and the road-clearing effort.

China and Nepal have maintained close coordination in responding to the disaster. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently held a phone call with his Nepali counterpart, Shisir Khanal, briefing him on the progress of China's assistance package, which includes about 2 million US dollars in emergency cash aid and humanitarian supplies for Nepal. China has also sent two teams of tunnel-rescue experts, one to the disaster site and one to Kathmandu, to assist with the search. On the information front, China has shared satellite imagery of the affected areas, hydrological monitoring data, and early-warning information about the upstream barrier lake with Nepali authorities — coordination between the two countries' frontline rescue command systems has visibly improved since the early days of the disaster.

Across the border as a whole, Nepal has also suffered heavily. Nepal's National Disaster Management Authority has reported hundreds of deaths and several thousand more people listed as missing nationwide, figures that, like the toll on the Chinese side, continue to be updated as the search proceeds. Analysts note that the disaster's immediate trigger — a high-altitude glacier collapse — is emblematic of a broader rise in glacial hazards across the Himalayas as the region warms, including the growing risk of glacial lake outburst floods. Although China and Nepal have held years of discussions over infrastructure projects around Gyirong Port, including a proposed cross-border railway, the two sides have yet to formalize a binding agreement on real-time cross-border hazard monitoring and joint early-warning mechanisms — a governance gap that this disaster has drawn renewed attention to.

Scientists say this ice-collapse-triggered landslide is not an isolated event. A report released in March 2026 by the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) found that glacier melt rates across the Hindu Kush Himalaya region have roughly doubled since 2000. Observations also indicate that the area where this glacier collapsed has been warming at roughly twice the global average rate in recent decades, with local temperatures up by about 2.8 degrees Celsius (about 5 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1940. Experts warn that as high-altitude areas continue to warm and permafrost and snow conditions change, compound hazards such as ice-collapse debris flows and glacial lake outburst floods could become more frequent along the Himalayan border in the future, posing a long-term threat to border infrastructure, trade routes and cross-border travel between China and Nepal — and forming an important part of the backdrop to discussions between the two sides on setting up a standing joint monitoring and early-warning mechanism.

For now, Chinese rescue teams continue to search the core zone at Gyirong Port around the clock, alongside ongoing work to reopen the road. Xizang's regional government has published two hotline numbers for the families of domestic residents still unaccounted for, while efforts to relocate affected residents and provide relief supplies are proceeding in parallel. Officials have said the search will continue as long as there remains any hope of finding survivors, though they caution that the difficult terrain and weather in the disaster zone mean the operation is likely to remain challenging in the days ahead.