Beijing: A massive earthquake rocked the Tibetan plateau and shook China's Quinghai province, measuring 6.9 on the richter scale around 5 am on Wednesday. It destroyed many homes and monastries as China state TV says at least 300 people have been and some 8,000 are injured.
The epicenter was about 240 kilometers northwest of Qamdo, Tibet. Qinghai borders the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xing-jiang and the provinces of Gansu and Sichuan.
The foothills to the south and east of the area are home to herders and Tibetan monastaries. Three aftershocks rattled the area near the border with Tibet within half an hour after the earthquake.
In 2008, a magnitude 7.9 quake in Sichuan province left almost 90,000 people dead or missing.
Many residents of the remote area could be without shelter in temperatures that hover near freezing in Yushu, and even colder in the high mountain villages.
"Certainly there have been people hurt. Rescuers are trying to pull them out," said resident Talen Tashi.
"A lot of one-storey houses have collapsed. Taller buildings have held up, but there are big cracks in them."
People from the Yushu prefecture highway department were frantically trying to dig out colleagues trapped in a collapsed building, department official Ji Guodong said by telephone.
Most of the low residential buildings had fallen, Huang Limin, a government official in Yushu told state television.
"Casualties are unclear. Maybe dozens were injured, maybe more. It's hard to say," said Zhuo De, an ethnic Tibetan resident of Yushu, who spoke by phone from the capital of Qinghai province after contacting his family in Yushu.
"The homes are built with thick walls and are strong, but if they collapsed they could hurt many people inside."
The quake was centred in the mountains that divide Qinghai province from the Tibet Autonomous Region.
The foothills to the south and east of the area are home to herders and Tibetan monasteries of Yushu county, known for its horse festival, while the area to the north and west is arid and desolate.
The quake was centred 150 miles (240 km) north northwest of Qamdo in Tibet and 235 miles (375 km) south southeast of the mining town of Golmud in Qinghai, and had a depth of 6.2 miles (10 km), it said.
A magnitude 5.0 quake struck the same region late on Tuesday night, and aftershocks of magnitude-6 and over rattled the town Wednesday morning, sending fearful residents into the streets.
The Tibetan plateau is regularly shaken by earthquakes, but casualties are usually minimal because so few people live there.
Movement of the Indian subcontinent toward the Himalayas has thrust up the plateau, triggering quakes in the foothills including the magnitude-8 quake that hit Sichuan province in May 2008, killing 80,000 people.
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