With 50,000 people, many of them children, now dead and with whole towns turned to rubble, how will the people of China's Sichuan province cope?, asks Clifford Coonanin Dujiangyan.
IN THE REMAINS of their home, a shattered family is preparing to say goodbye to 16-year-old Zhou Yating, who died in Juyuan Middle School during the earthquake that tore the heart out of Sichuan less than one week ago. To many in the zone, it feels like an eternity.
The quake took place at 2.30pm on Monday and Yating's mother, Wang Kanghua, rushed to the school near Dujiangyan city as soon as the tremors had stopped. The school is just a few hundred metres away from her family's house, and she ran with her relatives to the appalling scene.
"We were already there by the time the rescue team arrived at three. We dug for seven hours with our bare hands to find my daughter's body. She was dead, her hands and feet were all injured," she says as the final funeral preparations are being made. "Yating is my only child. She was about to take the high-school entrance exams. Her grades were great and she worked hard."
The family is gathered around a tarpaulin tent with two large funeral wreaths leaning against it, and candles standing on each side of the entrance. Inside the tent is a picture of Yating, a pretty Sichuan girl with a side parting and a resolute expression, with the photograph surrounded by offerings of food for the afterlife. Her grandparents are burning symbolic paper money on a pile in front of the shrine. "The candles are to light her way to the other side and the money is there to make sure she is looked after when she gets there. She loved sports, was a party member. She was the best student in her school," says her grandfather, Zhou Shugen.
Yating's father is building a tomb in the family's ancestral home of Wolong Cun, in the countryside one kilometre away, and she will be buried today.
"I want my daughter to go peacefully. This is a disaster, we've no way out," says her mother.
Just down the street from Yating's house, Xiao Wenyi, 22, is also burying a loved one, his little sister, Dong Yang, who was 17 when she died. The family is currently bivouacked in a tarpaulin-covered tent because their house is too dangerous to enter. "We found her body the day after. My little sister Yang loved to read books, and loved her music," he says.
He's minding the house while his mother goes to pick up some supplies. His and Yang's father, a bus driver from Chengdu, is due to arrive later that afternoon.
Juyuan Middle School collapsed quickly, leaving the blackboards exposed on the few supporting walls left standing. Seven hundred of the 900 students inside perished.
As the quake happened in the early afternoon, most of the local children were at school. After lunch, pupils in Chinese schools take a nap, so many were sleeping, while others were doing their afternoon schoolwork. The mud around the school was littered with copybooks and textbooks, and one little boy was found holding a pen.
The stories you hear on the streets of Dujiangyan, which lies about 50km from the epicentre of the quake, are heartbreaking, but they are only some of the thousands of tales of horror that people in Sichuan province have to tell.
It's been a week of unthinkable casualty figures, of relief work hampered by bad weather and by the sheer inaccessibility of some affected areas, of images that are difficult to shake. A man on his motorbike, talking into his mobile phone, with the body of his wife tied with rope to his back. A distraught mother hanging out of a crane's hook, refusing to accept that the machine has not unearthed her child alive. A grandfather sitting beneath a tarpaulin waiting for his real, living, beloved granddaughter to emerge from the wreck of her school, not the dead child over whom the rest of the family is grieving.
Catastrophes on this scale affect all strata of society, but as the news started to emerge from Sichuan it became clear that it was the children who had suffered disproportionately this time. These are the lost xiao pengyoumen (little friends) of Sichuan, who died in their thousands.
This was China's worst natural disaster since the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, and it shook buildings right across China, north and south. Estimates are that 50,000 people have perished, with many towns still buried and the infrastructure still in pieces. It was clear straight away that this was a massive disaster. The blinds of my office shook in Beijing, hundreds of kilometres away; workers were evacuated elsewhere in the capital and in Shanghai; and the tremors were felt in Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam. If this was the impact so far away, imagine what it must have done to the towns near the epicentre of the quake. The initial numbers coming out of the Xinhua news agency were four or five dead, which soon became hundreds. Then the figures began to accelerate. President Hu Jintao issued a statement urging everyone to rally behind the relief efforts. Premier Wen Jiabao flew to the scene of the quake and has remained there.
This has been a story of escalation. Each day I have reported the story of the Sichuan earthquake it has seemed impossible to imagine things getting worse. Hanwang, with its bodies lying everywhere, was grotesque. Dujiangyan, where hundreds of teenagers were dragged out dead from the mud, was nightmarish.
But every day is worse than the one before. No one knows what horrors await after Wenchuan, the mountainous county directly above the epicentre, is opened up more fully. At this stage, there can be precious few survivors there. Beichuan is a truly horrendous sight. The prospect of the death toll reaching beyond 50,000 looks increasingly likely.
WITH 1.3 BILLION PEOPLE, everything in China seems to be a question of scale. Sichuan has 85 million people, more than Germany, so the sheer numbers involved are often harrowing. And just as people die on a grand scale, the living need to be accommodated on a grand scale. Refugees have gathered in a sports arena in Mianyang, converted into a shelter for tens of thousands of homeless people, where relatives hold up signs with the names of missing family members.
The grounds around the Second People's Hospital in Deyang City have been transformed into a huge outdoor ward, with thousands of injured lying on makeshift beds in blue tents.
The traditional image of an earthquake, the one I grew up with from Hollywood movies, was of a gaping tear in the road, into which cars fell and from which people ran waving their arms. It was only on the fourth day of reporting from Sichuan that I saw the classic quake image, the fissure made by tectonic plates shifting and ripping the tarmac apart, on the road leading to Beichuan, one of the most hellish places on earth right now.
Many refugees have been airlifted out, and the rescue effort has been going on there since early in the week, but the town is still in bits. It's a real possibility that the government will abandon the old town and rebuild it elsewhere, so great is the devastation.
Dotted along the narrow mountainside road are smashed cars and rocks the size of lorries, which limit traffic to one lane. There are hundreds of military vehicles along the roadside.
Reaching Beichuan is a difficult three-kilometre struggle across landslides and over mountains. When you finally emerge scrabbling through the dirt into the town, what lies before you is a breathtaking vision of horror. It's basically a pile of rubble. Nearly all the buildings are collapsed into a heap at the centre of the valley.
At a kindergarten, a father found his son's body in the pile, wrapped it carefully in a plastic sheet and carried him away. His wife is a migrant worker who lives elsewhere in China, but when he tried to call her on his mobile to tell her their child was dead, there was as yet no signal.
The number of children who have perished also highlights another long-term social problem. The one-child policy, imposed in 1979 to rein in population growth that was already dangerously out of control, limits most families to a single child. What are the grieving parents of Dujiangyan to do, now that they have lost their only offspring?
Even amid the heartbreak of Beichuan there is an occasional story of hope. One of the most affecting sights was, finally, a story of life.
"Don't help me, help the others - they need it more," one woman said as soldiers ran, carrying her on a stretcher, into a makeshift first-aid centre, seconds after pulling her from the wreckage. She had lived through 72 terrible hours under the rubble.
As the week progressed, initial misery turned to frustration about the inability to do anything about the massive loss of life. When earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical storms and flooding strike down whole communities, there is an awful lot of unfocused anger. There isn't anyone to blame as such.
This anger often turns on the rescuers. In Beichuan, refugees threw water bottles at soldiers, saying they had come too late. There had been hundreds of people crying and shouting in the rubble even on Wednesday, they said, but it was too late now.
THE CHINESE RESPONSE to the earthquake was swift and immense, and tens of thousands of troops have been deployed. But there was little evidence of sniffer dogs or high-tech equipment. There weren't many helicopters around either, though you would expect to see choppers ferrying supplies and people.
China has a lot of experience in dealing with natural disasters and claims that this is the reason it did not want to commit itself to letting many foreign aid teams into the country to help. But China is not Burma - it has, cautiously, welcomed some foreign input, including Japanese rescue teams, and has also accepted foreign aid.
When prime minister Wen Jiabao first visited Beichuan he spotted an American doctor, Brian Robinson, of the Heart to Heart International aid organisation, walking with other volunteers along the road.
Wen ordered the car to stop, then embraced the doctor, thanked him, and told him to go to Beichuan and help - an unprecedented action.
Overall, the relief effort has been quite primitive: manpower and womanpower. This is largely because the worst-affected places are in inaccessible areas. It's a good time to have the largest standing army in the world of 2.2 million at hand.
The soldiers have been heroic - a propaganda line perhaps, but true.
Chi Defa, 29, is an officer in the People's Liberation Army and deputy team leader of a rescue team, based in Chengdu but travelling all over the beleaguered province.
"Our first task was to try to get to Beichuan to rescue people there, but because the road had not been cleared, we had to turn back, which was tough," he says. "But there is a lot to do, and we went to other damaged areas, where we set up tents for the survivors and for patients and some refugees from other areas.
"My whole team is eager to help people, but everyone is really worried. I come from Chengdu and so do my soldiers. I feel fulfilled by what I've done this week. I really want to help those people affected in the disaster areas. I'm so worried about our people, who have suffered terribly in this tragedy."
The foreign media have a poor image in China because most people now believe the international community does not want China to host the Olympics and is planning a boycott. This makes reporting the disaster difficult. Before the anti-Chinese riots in Tibet, and the sympathetic portrayal of Tibetan protestors in the western media, foreign journalists were popular. Now we are seen as a threat. But the soldiers are still helpful, even offering to lift us over the worst of the holes in the road.
The Olympics in August are generally far from people's minds. Many are furious about the inferior quality of the buildings constructed in the days when China was a much poorer place, 30 years ago, especially the schools. In Mianzhu, an apartment block collapsed on itself. The flats had been built using contributions from a local work unit, a group of workers organised by the Communist Party at a factory or office.
Residents searching for survivors say it was because corrupt officials had demanded so much in kickbacks that the building fell. The neighbouring buildings had not collapsed, including one which housed cadres from the Communist Party. "Show me the structural steel in that building," spits one woman, whose mother is missing in the rubble. "It all went into some official's pocket."
But there has also been an incredible sense of community. "We are all one family and one nation, and when our friend suffers it's our duty to help," says Lu Fushan, 49, a farmer who is one of a trio of relief workers in a truck, laden with baskets for carrying debris out of the wreckage of Beichuan. Volunteers from nearby Mianyang walk alongside the truck, bringing money, clothes, food and water. Everyone wants to help, be it giving a lift to someone trying to get home or offering food.
By the end of the week, Dujiangyan city is still packed with rescue workers and dozens of army trucks line the streets near the school. Digging for bodies has stopped and soldiers are disinfecting the site - there are fears of disease in the quake zone becoming the next problem.
In the shops and houses, people are trying to gather up what few belongings are left before heading on to refugee camps. After a week in hell, the next challenge is to start putting their lives back together.
