The Yangtze River is seen by many in China as their Mother River. And here's the story of a man whose whole life has been about protecting it. CGTN's Tao Yuan reports.

A river so vast that it dwarfs human dimension. Dynasty after dynasty, it has nurtured so many and took so much away in moments of rage. Yang Xin has tried his whole life to explore the Mighty Yangtze. In the 1980s, he was with a team of young adventurers who rafted through the most turbulent rapids on the river. 11 people died in that expedition.

YANG XIN, FOUNDER YANGTZE RIVER HEADWATERS ECOLOGICAL CONSERVATION STATION "Seeing my teammates die gave me a sense of responsibility. I felt a need to understand this river and protect it."

He became a conservationist. And the Yangtze headwater region has since become part of his life. It's a pristine land, little touched by human civilization. Square mile after square mile of mountains and glaciers, high on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, with lifeforms so diverse that humans have never come close to fully cataloguing everything. A land that seems frozen in time - but recently, human activities and global warming have combined to threaten the fragile ecosystem here.

YANG XIN, FOUNDER YANGTZE RIVER HEADWATERS ECOLOGICAL CONSERVATION STATION "When I first came here, I used to see flocks of Tibetan antelope at the foot of the Geladaindong Mountain. And then years later, only two or three. The glaciers are melting, the grassland deteriorating. You can see it."

And you can certainly see it in his work. He took these two photos 14 years apart. The shrinking of the glacier is only too obvious. It may seem, at times, there's so little men can do. But Yang never stopped.

YANG XIN, FOUNDER YANGTZE RIVER HEADWATERS ECOLOGICAL CONSERVATION STATION "I've fallen off snow mountains, been surrounded by packs of wolves, I was stranded out in the wild without food. But life is full of different flavors. Where there's a fight, there's sacrifice."

Yang Xin has been upstream for three decades now. One man at the river, through all its calmness and turbulence. TY, CGTN, on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.