Abstract: The India-Eurasia collision and the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau have profoundly changed the topography and climate patterns of Asia, triggering reorganization of large river systems. Recently, the evolution of large rivers on the northern South China Sea has become a frontier and hot issue in geoscience research. Offshore oil and gas exploration and the implementation of the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) have provided continuous and accurately dated sedimentary records for reconstructing the evolution of major rivers in South China. This article reviews the sedimentary provenance investigations of the Cenozoic basins in the northern South China Sea in the past two decades, and discusses the progress in the evolution of major rivers in South China, such as the Red and Pearl Rivers. Provenance research in the Yinggehai Basin shows that the Red River has been the main supplier since the late Eocene; and there are differences in provenance signals between the Yinggehai and large rivers of the Tibet Plateau (including the Nujiang, the Lancang and the Yangtze Rivers.), indicating that they have not flowed into the Yinggehai Basin since the late Eocene. During the Eocene to early Oligocene, the Pearl River Mouth Basin was mainly supplied by the South China, indicating that the Pearl River was relatively small. Driven by the opening of the South China Sea in the late Oligocene, the Pearl River expanded westward to the southeastern Tibetan Plateau. Cenozoic stratigraphy in Taiwan records that the ancient Minjiang River expanded westward to the Wuyi Mountain in the late Oligocene. This evidence shows that the opening of the South China Sea controlled the evolution of the large rivers in South China.