Abstract: Maintaining river's healthy life and realizing human-water harmony are our goal of the river management in the new era. Based on approaching the meaning of river's healthy life,this paper constructs evaluation index system for river's healthy life,which takes into consideration the satisfiactory degree of human society as well as the requirements of river's own life. From the multi-disciplinary synthesis,such as ecology,river morphology,economics,river mechanics,etc.,it constructs sixteen specific indices which reflect river structure and function at different layers and classes,indicates the meaning and the determination approach to the indices,and finally determines the index weight through the layered binary compared the expert analysis method.