Living in Beijing, it's always at the back of your mind that an earthquake can strike at any second. A massive tremor hit Tangshan not far away in 1976, killing a quarter of a million people, and there had been rumours that another was due any day now.
The Tangshan earthquake coincided with the demise of Chairman Mao Zedong, and there was naturally much fear of one last year when Deng Xiaoping died.
So when the computer screen literally danced before my eyes as I worked in my apartment at 11.50 on Saturday morning I instinctively made for the doorjamb, said to be the safest place when a tremor hits.
My wife stood in another. We watched the ceiling light sway as if caught in a draught, and a loose key hanging in a lock swing madly from side to side.
The epicentre was 220km (140 miles) away and the shock waves seemed to hit Beijing erratically. A young Chinese man was so frightened that he jumped from the second floor of an apartment block, the radio said, but some people out cycling noticed hardly a thing.
Afterwards the feeling was one of relief, not just that the shock waves did no damage but that we could perhaps stop worrying now. The tension in the tectonic plates around Beijing had been relieved for a few more years.
But then the bad news started to come in. At the epicentre near the town of Zhangbei 47 people had been killed and over 11,000 wounded.
Shortly after 7 a.m. yesterday my wife and I set out on the five-hour drive to the earthquake zone.
This was my third earthquake. I still retain vivid memories of coffins piled high along the roadside in Spitak after the Armenian tragedy of 1988 while the survivors stood around, paralysed by shock and grief, and the frantic digging by villagers for a little girl after an earthquake-induced mud slide in Tajikistan the following year, only to find her chalk-white body when it was too late.
The route lay to the north west, along a murderously-dangerous mountain road lined for mile after mile by piles of coal slack and leafless persimmon orchards.
Big coal trucks careered madly in each direction, swaying round peasants on mopeds and donkeys. We came across three serious accidents, one of which jammed the roadway for 30 minutes.
Ten kilometres from Zhangbei the police had set up a roadblock. No foreigners are allowed into the emergency area, said a plainclothes man in leather jacket. "Sorry. It's orders."
Despite phone calls to the Foreign Ministry and State Council office, it became clear they were not going to give way.
But half a mile back down the road, two young women told us how to get to the village of Xishunguo, where houses had been damaged beyond repair. We turned off into a grove of trees and emerged on a track running beside a river bed with solid strips of white ice.
It eventually petered out in a rock-hard yellow stubble field beyond which lay the village of about 200 single-storey brick and mud houses with red-tiled roofs.
In the unpaved lanes some old men in fur hats and buttoned-up jackets stood around gossiping in the wintry sunshine. Several children stopped playing and came running to see the car.
We carefully avoided a couple of black sows asleep in the roadway, roosters picking at old corn husks and a couple of big-eared donkeys standing motionless in the shafts of old carts. China is full of timeless villages like Xishunguo.
We came to the house of an elderly man called Wang Qun Bao and his son and daughter-in-law. The damage was typical of that in villages all around the earthquake zone.
The chimneys had been shaken into piles of broken bricks and big cracks had opened up in the walls. He brought us into the living room.
Inside the son and three of his friends sat cross-legged on the family bed-table, a raised platform kept warm by a pipe from a wood stove running underneath. They didn't stop the game of mah jong they were playing while his father pointed out a myriad of cracks in a wall (decorated with a poster of a bikini-clad girl on a motorcycle).
The Chinese can be very stoic in the face of disaster.
"That's what nature does," one of the youths said, shrugging, before returning to his game.
"When I saw the cracks break out I was so frightened I ran outside," said Mr Wang.
"We brought the television out and watched it for news. There were four of five more tremors up to about six o'clock, so nobody would go back in. We spent the night in the courtyard sleeping under straw."
Were you not very cold? I asked. The bitter breezes from the nearby mountains of Inner Mongolia bring the temperature down to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four Fahrenheit) at night.
"We were all so cold we had to run round the village this morning to warm up," he said.
Most of the inhabitants again planned to spend last night under the stars or in woodsheds, despite the temperature.
In another part of the village we met Fan Min, a cheerful old man carrying empty panniers on his shoulders who was eager to tell us what he had seen, as he had been in a Zhangbei street when the earthquake struck.
"It sounded like this," he said, making a noise like `Huaah!'
"Everybody screamed and ran out of their houses and then you couldn't see the houses any more because of a big cloud of dust. After that there was a big wind."
Everyone we spoke to mentioned the wind that suddenly blew up on an otherwise calm day just after the earthquake.
There was no panic, however, he said.
What did you do? I asked.
"What did I do? I caught the bus and came home."
This week's Asia Letter has been superseded by the earthquake