Tibetans mourned their dead with a mass cremation ceremony today after an earthquake devastated part of northwest China this week.
The death toll has now reached 1,144 with 417 missing, Xinhua news agency said, after a 6.9 magnitude quake hit Yushu county in Qinghai province, where most residents are ethnic Tibetans, devoted to their own branch of Buddhism.
Thousands of people converged on a hillside cremation site, where a convoy of trucks took many hundreds of bodies that had been kept at the main local monastery.
Many wept and chanted as crimson-gowned monks lit the piles of bodies covered in yak oil, wood and old tires. Hundreds of monks droned prayer-chants as the flames rose above the trenches, sending a column of smoke into the sky.
Many Tibetans resent the Han Chinese presence in the mountainous region high on the Tibetan plateau, and the controls the ruling Chinese Communist Party places on their Buddhist religion.
After the earthquake shook Yushu on Wednesday, thousands of Buddhist monks rushed in to help with rescue and relief, and Tibetans at the funeral spoke proudly of their work.
"I also feel that today there is unity among Tibetans," said Bairi Caile, a businessman at the cremation.
"Today is a day for Tibetans, for all Tibetan compatriots," said Guyong Wose, a 19-year-old monk who had travelled from Tagong in southwest Sichuan province to help the quake victims.
Before the cremation, some monks higher up on the hillside oversaw a small "sky burial", when parts of the dead were fed to the vultures, who were later seen circling through the smoke billowing from the hillside fire.
An ethnic Tibetan man called Zhaxi said one of the dead fed to the vultures with wingspans of almost two metres was his uncle, Suona, who died in the quake, crushed in his home. Zhaxi said the family had paid for the ceremony.
"If you can do it, a sky burial is the best way, the most pure way," said Zhaxi. "This is what our tradition expects."
Monks officiating at the cremation said they burnt about 1,300 bodies in the ceremony – a figure exceeding the official number.
Reuters