Rescue teams have rushed to a popular tourist spot in eastern China after a powerful earthquake left thousands of homes flattened and at least 13 people in the region dead. Seven teams had been dispatched to the worst-hit areas to bring food, water, and tents to the thousands of people caught up in Saturday's 5.7 earthquake, said Cao Junliang, an aid spokesman from the tourist city of Jiujiang.
The official Xinhua news agency said Sunday that 13 people had died and more than 450 were injured by what was believed to be the strongest earthquake to strike the region in half a century.
Initially 14 people were thought to have died and some newspapers were saying Sunday that the toll was as high as 16.
Most of the dead were in and around the cities of Jiujiang and Ruichang in Jiangxi province, although there were also fatalities in Wuxue, a city in neighboring Hubei.
The quake, which could be felt in cities hundreds of kilometres (miles) apart, hit at 8:49 am (0049 GMT), causing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.
"We'd just finished our breakfast, when we heard a huge roar, like someone setting off really loud firecrackers," said a civil affairs official in Ruichang.
"Then the houses started shaking, and we just jumped outside," the official, surnamed Liu, told AFP.
In Jiujiang, thousands of people were seen crowding city streets some 12 hours later, rattled by a series of aftershocks and fearing another strong quake.
Some wrapped themselves in blankets, with the temperature at about 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit).
In and around Ruichang, a total of 420,000 people had left their homes, apparently fearing the morning's earthquake might not be the last, according to the Xinhua website.
"Basically, everyone in Ruichang is right now out huddling in the street," said Liu, the civil affairs official. "I guess by nightfall we may need tents and blankets for them."
The International Red Cross had sent 500 tents to the disaster region, and would dispatch another 2,000 on Sunday, sina.com said.
The website showed photos reportedly taken in the large industrial city of Wuhan, more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the epicentre of the earthquake, showing cracked walls and toppled mannequins in shops.
"It felt like someone was yanking you violently," a Wuhan eyewitness told sina.com.
The tremor could also be felt in the city of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province located 300 kilometers away, according to the China News Service.
Gao Jianguo, a leading earthquake expert, was quoted by sina.com as saying the affected area was not known as an active seismic area.
"The biggest earthquake in recent years in Jiangxi struck in 1987, measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale," he was quoted as saying. "This is the biggest earthquake since 1949" to hit the region.
The US Geological Survey said the quake occurred about 10 kilometers below the surface of the earth.
That makes it a so-called "shallow" earthquake, similar to the devastating quake that struck in Kashmir in early October, a category of tremor generally known to cause greater damage than deeper ones.
Jiujiang is home to half a million people and a traditional scenic spot that was praised by Tang dynasty poets more than a millennium ago.
