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Crews reach wrecked China-Nepal border port
September 6, 2026
Rescue teams reached the flood-destroyed border crossing between Nepal and China's Tibet region a week after the mudslide, and no survivors have been found at the port.
The Rasuwagadhi crossing links Nepal with China's Tibet autonomous region and sits on a proposed trans-Himalayan rail route to Kathmandu. An earlier flood closed it, and a temporary Chinese bridge reopened it on 1 January.
Key facts
- China's most recent figures, issued Sunday evening local time after close to two days of silence, listed 43 dead and 519 missing on the Chinese side.
- China put up a temporary bridge, and the crossing was open again by 1 January.
- The crossing sits on the proposed route of a railway to Kathmandu, which Nepal and China plan to build as part of a trans-Himalayan rail network.
- Two Chinese government bodies put the trip together, the foreign ministry alongside the information office of the State Council.
Reuters carries an account of Chinese teams working through what is left of the border port. CNN reports from a trip that China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and State Council Information Office organized jointly, and sets out the arithmetic of the loss. In an update issued on Sunday evening local time, the first China had given in nearly two days, the authorities counted 43 dead on their side of the border, with 519 unaccounted for. Nobody has been found alive at the port. CNN also reports that the approach road was destroyed outright and now runs over gravel laid to make it usable, and that crews only got the roads open on Wednesday, a week into the emergency, which is when thousands of workers and heavy machinery could finally move in.
BBC works the clock at the crossing itself. From its origin, China says, the mudslide took around seven minutes to arrive. Video fragments and satellite pictures show a valley floor stripped of the buildings that used to fill it. A female official who logged the last transactions has not been found, nor have three members of staff. To trace who was there, BBC reports, investigators are leaning on electronic immigration records from Nepal's Rasuwagadhi post and on the account of the one staff member who lived. CNN reports that officials paired those immigration records with location tracking to work out who was missing.
The two accounts fit together rather than compete. BBC and CNN place the wreckage at the same crossing, both follow the search for people last logged entering the checkpoint, and both describe how hard the approach is. What is settled is that the border complex is wrecked, that no one has been found alive at the port, and that help took days to arrive. What happened once the water hit is not, and BBC reports it is still difficult to reconstruct.
At 08:03, six minutes after her earlier message, she wrote: "We are waiting to enter China." Nothing more came from her after that.
Still developing
The count of the missing on China's side of the border reads the same way in every account, and nothing in the record as of the draft cuts against it.