A race against time

With the roads cut, heavy machinery could not get through. Xinhua reported on May 14 that soldiers in Dujiangyan and Mianyang were digging victims out of the rubble with their bare hands. A 300-strong task force walked miles along muddy mountain paths to reach Wenchuan County.

Yingxiu was even worse than expected. An official of Aba prefecture said at the time that only about 2,300 of the town's more than 10,000 people were believed to have survived, and over 1,000 of them were badly injured. Cries for help came from under a ruined school, and people could only dig by hand.

Foreign teams joined in as well. Thirty-one Japanese rescuers with fibre-optic scopes and drills worked for 16 hours in a collapsed dormitory in Qingchuan. They found Song Aimei and her 70-day-old daughter, but neither had survived. A second Japanese group of 29 then went on to Beichuan. A 41-member Korean team searched the ruins of the Hongda chemical plant in Shifang with sniffer dogs, and Russian and Singaporean teams were also at work in the disaster zone.

There were 237 foreign rescuers in all, from Japan, Russia, South Korea and Singapore. On May 17 it was reported that Russian rescuers had found a 61-year-old woman alive after up to 127 hours under the rubble, the first survivor found by a foreign team. By the end of May, 133,000 soldiers and armed police were in the quake zone.

Alive under the rubble

Seventy-two hours is generally taken as the prime time for finding survivors after a major quake. In Wenchuan, people were still being pulled out alive after more than 100 hours. Bian Gangfen, 31, a waitress at the club of a fertiliser factory in Yinghua, Shifang, was buried when a five-storey building collapsed. Rescuers found her alive with a life detector at about 23:00 on Friday, May 16, but a huge pillar was in the way. Rescuers from the Wuhan hospital of the Guangzhou Military Command and from Zhengzhou kept digging, and 20 hours later she was carried out, 124 hours after the quake. "It is a miracle that a woman could survive 124 hours after being buried," a doctor at the site said.

The same report had other stories like hers. In Dujiangyan, Zhang Xiaoping, 46, was saved after almost 129 hours and taken straight to hospital to have his legs amputated. In Yingxiu, Jiang Yuhang, 20, a highway worker, was freed from the ruins of his home after 123 hours. Ji Zhongshan, 52, was pulled from a collapsed hotel in Beichuan after 117 hours, and two monks were found at a Taoist temple near Yinghua after about five days. China Daily reported on May 20 that Li Ningcui, 61, had been rescued after 145 hours under a market in Beichuan. "Although the chances of survival for those trapped are slim, we are still searching for miracles," said Kim Yong-suk, leader of the South Korean team.

In Beichuan, a geologist surnamed Mei walked past a collapsed clinic at about 2 am and heard a weak voice. He had no equipment, so he kept talking to her. She was Duan Zhongying, a 23-year-old nurse buried under the five-storey building. Volunteers brought in about ten firefighters, and the rescue began at 7 am. After eight hours she was free, 96 hours after the quake. Her fiancé, Li Bolan, had come back to the ruins again and again; the two had been planning their wedding.

Li Yang, 16, a tenth-grader at Beichuan Middle School, was in the county auditorium when the quake struck. He got out and ran back to the school. There he held up a drip bottle for his classmate Liao Bo, whose left leg was trapped, and the photo moved the nation. He also gave water from a bottle cap to a trapped girl, who survived. Liao lost his leg and turned 17 on May 24 in a hospital in Chongqing. More than 1,100 people, most of them students, died or were missing at the school; 49 of the 69 students in Li's class died, including his cousin. "If I had arrived earlier, my cousin and many others might not have died," he said.

Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao

About two hours after the quake, Wen Jiabao was already on a plane to the disaster zone. China Daily reported that over the next 48 hours or so he visited nearly every badly hit city and town, including Dujiangyan, Deyang, Mianzhu, Mianyang, Beichuan and Wenchuan. In one factory he stroked the cheek of a crying girl and told her: "Don't cry. Food will be sent in a short time. Biscuits and milk powder will be sent, too." He wept as he watched rescuers try to free two children from a ruined primary school in Dujiangyan. On the video site Tudou, a clip called "Dear Premier Wen, you moved China" drew a large audience.

On May 16, Hu Jintao visited Shengli Village in Leigu, Beichuan, where more than 1,000 of the town's 18,000 people had died or were missing. He stepped into a tent and told a family: "We know you've suffered." All the classroom buildings of Beichuan Middle School had collapsed, and 300 teachers and pupils were still buried. "Saving lives is still an urgent task," Hu said. "We should rescue them by every possible means as long as there is a glimmer of hope." At a field clinic he kissed the face of Luo Mengxi, a girl of three and a half who had lost her mother.

The same day, Wen told reporters on a train in Sichuan: "We won't give up if there is even the slightest hope of finding more survivors."

On May 24, on his second trip to the disaster area, Wen held a press conference with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the rubble of Yingxiu. "The whole world is standing behind you and will help you," Ban said. Wen named three main difficulties: there were not enough tents, and he wanted a tent primary school for every 1,000 tents and a middle school for every 2,000; epidemics had to be prevented; and sources of pollution had to be cut off and cultural heritage protected. He said the death toll could reach 70,000 or 80,000 or more.

Volunteers, donations and counselling

Volunteers poured into the quake zone. Zhu Yuantong, 19, who owned a pet shop in Mianyang, left his business to help with the rescue in Beichuan, where about 80% of the buildings had been destroyed, and went more than 20 hours without food. "As we rushed there, more volunteers joined us," he said. "They were from my city, Chongqing and Shanghai."

Donations came in quickly. By May 17 they had reached 6.02 billion yuan, and 126 companies had each given at least 10 million yuan. State Grid gave 200 million yuan, and Taiwan's Formosa Plastics gave 100 million yuan in cash. By May 22 the total was 16 billion yuan. On June 3 China Daily reported that overseas Chinese had given 1.13 billion yuan (US$163 million), and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office planned to use it for 100 schools and 100 small hospitals in the quake zone.

The government tightened its own belt. On May 22 it was reported that the State Council would cut central government departments' spending by 5% to raise a 70 billion yuan reconstruction fund, and would stop building new government offices.

Survivors also needed help with their minds. On May 17 a 50-member team led by the psychiatrist Wang Jian became the first psychiatric team to reach Chengdu. He called it "the largest ever post-disaster psychological relief effort since the founding of the PRC". More than 20,000 homeless people were living in Mianyang's Jiuzhou Gymnasium and more than 16,000 in the gymnasium in Mianzhu, over 800 of them children. Some children woke at night shouting: "Mama, there is an earthquake!"

The collapsed schools

The quake struck during lessons. NPR reported in July that about 7,000 classrooms had collapsed, and Xinhua said 18,000 families had lost children.

The Taipei Times reported on May 30 that many parents were upset that some schools for poor students had crumbled while nearby government offices and elite schools stood almost intact. Parents in Dujiangyan, Mianzhu and elsewhere turned mourning gatherings into protests, demanding to know why the schools had fallen. Jiang Guohua, the Communist Party chief of Mianzhu, went down on his knees to beg marching parents to stop. The magazine Caijing called for an investigation into shoddy school building, and Xinhua also published a commentary saying officials should respond quickly.

Education Ministry spokesman Wang Xuming promised to reassess school buildings in the quake zone and said those who had cut corners would be "severely punished".

At the end of May the quality inspection authority (AQSIQ) also promised "severe punishment" and took samples from the rubble of collapsed schools. "Seeking truth is more important than losing face," said Lin Qiang of the Sichuan education department, who withdrew as an Olympic torchbearer. More than 100 parents from Fuxin No 2 Primary School in Mianzhu marched in protest. At Beichuan Middle School alone, more than 1,100 people, most of them students, died or were missing.

A nation in mourning

The State Council declared May 19–21 days of national mourning, the first time China had held national mourning for ordinary citizens. Flags flew at half-staff at home and at missions abroad, public entertainment stopped, and Beijing's Olympic organisers suspended the torch relay for three days. At 14:28 on May 19 the country stood in silence for three minutes; in one photo taken in Sichuan, every vehicle in the street is sounding its horn.

At 14:28 sirens wailed and cars, trains and ships sounded their horns. Hu Jintao, in a dark suit with a white flower, stood in silence with the Politburo Standing Committee at Zhongnanhai, while Vice-Premier Li Keqiang was in Beichuan. On Tiananmen Square the crowd broke the silence with chants of "Go China" and "Rebuild Sichuan". The stock and futures exchanges stopped trading for three minutes, CCTV blacked out its screen, people prostrated themselves in front of the Potala Palace, and foreign rescuers took off their helmets. Ban Ki-moon attended a ceremony at China's mission to the UN. In Hanwang, Mianzhu, a clock had stopped at the moment of the quake.

The internet went quiet too. A chart published by Google China's engineering team shows search traffic dropping almost to zero during the silence. Within hours of the quake, people had posted mobile-phone footage online; Xinhua counted more than 4,200 quake videos on Tudou alone.

Aftershocks, quake lakes and a helicopter crash

The aftershocks kept coming. On May 25 a magnitude 6.4 aftershock centred on Qingchuan killed six people and injured nearly 1,000. In Guangyuan, 71,000 homes that had survived the main quake were levelled and 200,000 more were in danger of collapse. Office towers swayed in Beijing.

Landslides had blocked rivers and formed 35 quake lakes, which threatened 700,000 people downstream. The most dangerous was Tangjiashan in Beichuan, and some 1,600 police and soldiers hiked up to it, each carrying 10 kg of explosives. At the end of May another 1,000 soldiers carried 10 tonnes of diesel up on foot. More than 150,000 people living below the lake were evacuated.

At 14:56 on May 31, a Mi-171 helicopter returning from Lixian with 13 injured people hit turbulence and fog and crashed 7.5 km from Yingxiu. The search took 12 days, and the site was found only on June 10. All 5 crew and 12 passengers had died. The crew were named martyrs, and more than 1,000 soldiers carried the bodies out of the mountains on foot.

Pandas and Strong Pig

The Wolong panda reserve is only 30 km from the epicentre. Five of its workers died, two pandas were hurt and six went missing, four of which came back. Fourteen of the 32 enclosures were destroyed. The bamboo in store lasted two days, after which the pandas were fed rice porridge. 1,500 kg of bamboo was shipped in, and more came from Baoxing. Six pandas were moved to Ya'an and eight to Beijing Zoo, leaving 47 at Wolong, among them Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan, the pair meant as a gift to Taiwan.

On June 17 soldiers were clearing rubble in Pengzhou when the owner, Wan Xingming, warned them that the dead pig underneath could be infectious. The pig turned out to be alive. It had lived 36 days on charcoal and rainwater, and had shrunk from about 150 kg to a third of that; one witness said it was "as thin as a goat". The curator of the Jianchuan Museum bought it for 3,008 yuan and named it Zhu Jianqiang, Strong Pig.

Paired assistance and rebuilding

In early June the biggest danger was Tangjiashan, a lake formed by the quake and holding about 250 million cubic metres of water. Engineers dug a spillway and started draining it on June 7. By the afternoon of June 10, inflow and outflow had balanced, and Sichuan Party chief Liu Qibao declared a "decisive victory". More than 250,000 people downstream in Mianyang had been moved beforehand, and no casualties were reported.

On June 5, the leadership decided that each affected county would be paired with a province-level region, which would help it rebuild with labour, materials, money and expertise. By September 10, all 677,131 prefab temporary homes had been built, and donations from home and abroad came to 59.468 billion yuan.

The old Beichuan county town, home to 20,000 people, sits on the Longmen Shan fault. A report of May 23 said about 8,600 people there had died and 5,894 were missing. The survivors were moved to Mianyang and Anxian, and officials said the site was too dangerous to rebuild on. "Experts say the only option is to move the town and keep the remains," said Zhang Jie, spokesman for Mianyang.

In November Mianyang decided to build the new Beichuan county seat east of the towns of Yong'an and Anchang in Anxian County, more than 4 km from the nearest fault, with help from Shandong province. More than 8,600 of the 13,000 people of Qushan, the old county town, had been killed. Beichuan is China's only Qiang autonomous county; about 300,000 Qiang lived there before the quake, and about one in ten of them died. The old town is to become a national earthquake museum.

Exams, the torch and the Olympics

In the quake zone the college entrance exam was delayed by nearly a month and began on July 3. 120,000 students sat it, 96,000 from 45 counties in Sichuan and 24,000 from 17 counties in Gansu, and 78% of them wrote in makeshift classrooms. The Chinese essay title was "The Story I Most Want To Tell". Huang Qian, 18, whose mother had died in the quake, went to the exam in jeans her mother had bought her.

The Sichuan leg of the Olympic torch relay, first planned for June, was put off until August. In Guang'an on August 3 it opened with a minute's silence for the dead, after which shouts of "Rebuild Sichuan! Go China!" rang along the 7.3 km route. The first torchbearer was Jiang Min, a policewoman from Pengzhou who had lost 10 relatives, including her two-year-old daughter and her parents. There were 862 torchbearers in Sichuan, among them 29 newly chosen quake rescuers.

On August 4 the torch reached Leshan. Its last bearer there was Tan Guoqiang, 44, a primary school teacher from Wenchuan who had searched for survivors for 70 hours after losing his wife. In Mianyang the torch was shown in the Jiuzhou Stadium, which had sheltered more than 20,000 survivors from Beichuan and Mianzhu. The Sichuan leg ended in Chengdu on August 5, the same day Sichuan was hit by another earthquake, of magnitude 6.0.

On the evening of August 8 the Beijing Olympics opened. Lin Hao, 9, a second-grader at Yuzixi Primary School in Yingxiu, walked at the head of the 1,099-member Chinese delegation beside Yao Ming, who carried the flag. During the quake Lin had risked his life to rescue schoolmates and was injured himself; he was later named a "Teenage Hero in Earthquake Rescue and Relief".