The first that millions of Chinese knew of the tragic events in New York and Washington on Tuesday was when they awoke yesterday morning, 10 hours after the first aircraft had struck the World Trade Centre.
Many had gone to bed on Tuesday night oblivious to the mayhem unfolding in the United States as the tightly-controlled state TV channels did not initially carry reports.
As the news filtered through yesterday, there was little sympathy for the US administration on the streets of Beijing.
Seventy-year-old retired power station worker, Mr Ma Junling, seemed to reflect the feelings of many Beijingers.
"America deserved it. America is bad. They bombed our embassy in Belgrade (in 1998) and they caused one of our planes to crash in April," he told The Irish Times.
"America thinks it is an international policeman and can interfere in any country's affairs. Well they can't. I have sympathy for the innocent people who died."
One taxi-driver said America had got what it had been asking for.
"Of course we have sympathy with all those people who died. But America got what it deserved," he said.
Chinese newspapers delayed their morning issues by at least an hour to change their front pages.
Most carried pictures of the World Trade Centre billowing smoke into the sky over Manhattan.
The main headline in the Beijing Youth Daily said: "Terrorists attack the United States". The official English language newspaper, the China Daily, said: "Terror strikes heart of US". Ordinary Chinese scrambled for information, as access to many foreign websites is blocked.
Those who did get news of the tragedy on Tuesday night did so through internet chat rooms and from Phoenix TV, beamed from Hong Kong.
The first reports were not carried on China Central television, state TV, until after midnight on Tuesday, three hours after the first strike on the twin towers, when most people had gone to bed.
Even at that, there was no live film footage, unlike the wall-to-wall coverage from BBC World News, CNN and Fox News, beamed into hotels, western office blocks, embassies and expatriate compounds across China.
The Irish Times was told by one university source in Beijing that many students said they were happy at what happened when they turned up for lectures.
"It was amazing. Many seemed elated at the awful events," the source said.
Internet chat rooms were also full of anti-American comments.