The Third Front Construction (1964–1980) relocated major industrial and defence capacity to China’s inland regions under acute geopolitical tension. Existing scholarship has reconstructed the campaign’s political economy and built legacy, but has paid less attention to how architectural knowledge was produced when established planning models were rendered inadequate by mountainous terrain, secrecy, material scarcity, and compressed construction schedules. Guided by the principle “dispersal and concealment in the mountains, and, when necessary, retreating into caves” (靠山、分散、隐蔽、必要时进洞), this study examines how designers received, tested, adapted, circulated, and institutionalized knowledge through Third Front practice. It triangulates archival plans and drawings, technical reports, professional periodicals, standard-design catalogues, field surveys, and oral-history accounts, using Hubei’s industrial units as primary cases and projects in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hunan as comparisons. The article argues that geopolitical and geographic constraints functioned not only as limitations but also as epistemic conditions. Soviet-derived industrial planning was translated from concentrated, standardized layouts into dispersed, terrain-responsive systems; local materials and construction techniques became sources of situated design knowledge; and project experience circulated through design institutes, journals, internal reports, textbooks, codes, and standard drawings. Through these linked processes, provisional solutions were converted into an institutionalized body of expertise in mountainous industrial planning and underground construction. This framework recasts the Third Front from a history of isolated projects as a history of architectural knowledge under constraint, while also exposing the costs of that knowledge regime, including over-dispersal, low construction standards, and long-term safety and operational problems. The study contributes to histories of Cold War architecture by showing how strategic urgency reorganized the production, reception, and authority of design knowledge.