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The correlation between physical and chemical weathering in mountainous rivers is debatable. A reliable geochemical tracer for physical erosion and chemical weathering is necessary to obtain crucial information on the relationship between weathering processes and environmental changes on the Earth’s surface. Small mountainous rivers (SMRs) of Taiwan are characterized by extremely high physical and chemical weathering, and therefore, they provide the foremost natural laboratory for studying weathering processes in tectonically active high-standing islands. In this study, water samples collected from the Kaoping River, the largest river catchment in southern Taiwan, were analyzed for elemental concentrations, as well as for U and Li isotopes, to understand the weathering processes and to evaluate the use of the ²³⁴U/²³⁸U activity ratio, hereafter (²³⁴U/²³⁸U), as a probe for weathering. The average (²³⁴ …