Tremor in China kills 47

BEIJING, Jan 10: A powerful earthquake jolted farming villages near the Great Wall today, killing 35 people and toppling hundreds of houses, China's Xinhua News Agency reported, says AP.

The magnitude 6.2 quake devastated villages in two countries in the Yan Mountains and shook buildings 250 kilometers (150 miles) to the south in Beijing.

Rescue teams found that 800 houses in the country seat of Shangyi, on Hebei province's border with Inner Mongolia, had collapsed or cracked and that nearly all houses in Zhangbei, the main town in the neighbouring country, had cracks, Xinhua said.

In four towns along the two countries border, 80 per cent of the houses had collapsed, said Huangfu Qing, a seismologist coordinating rescue work from Zhangjiakou, a city bordering the two countries.

Neither he nor Xinhua provided details on the 35 deaths. Huang said in addition more than 164 people had been injured.

The quake struck at 11:50 am (0350 GMT), when many people were indoors getting ready for lunch. Residents in Beijing felt apartment buildings quiver. Guests at a hotel in Zhangjiakou, 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Shangyi, ran outside in fright.

"The building shook. Things shook" for several seconds, said a switchboard operator at the Zhangjiakou Guest House who only gave her surname, Zhao. She said no buildings collapsed.

In the county seat of Shangyi, "houses split, walls cracked and glass shattered," said Wang Haiyan of the local seismology office.

Most of the damaged buildings were rustic peasant homes of mud and brick, Wang said. She and other local government officials said the county's rough terrain makes a quick assessment of casualties and damage difficult.

Shangyi lies north of one of the patchwork of fortifications running along mountain ridges that form the Great Wall. Nearby Zhangjiakou city was for centuries an important trading town linking Beijing, the imperial capital, with Mongolia.

A magnitude 6 quake is capable of causing several damage. Government seismologists predicted aftershocks would hit the region but there would be no major quake, Xinhua said. It added that Beijing would not be affected.

Earthquakes and other natural disasters are seen by many Chinese as portents of political upheaval. Two months after the last major quake hit northern China- a 7.8 magnitude temblor that killed more than 240,000 people in Tangshan in 1976-revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung died.