China cremates quake dead as toll rises

Buddhist monks cremated hundreds of China quake victims over sanitation fears yesterday as hopes dimmed of finding further survivors, with the death toll rising to more than 1,400.

Naked, bloodied and bruised corpses were piled on a massive funeral pyre outside the shattered town of Jiegu on the remote Tibetan plateau and lit by chanting Buddhist monks, three days after the quake left thousands homeless.

The scale of the calamity and fears of disease forced a break from traditional Tibetan 'sky burials' in which corpses are left on mountain tops to decompose or be consumed by vultures.

"We have never had a disaster like this. We have never had so many people die. Cremation is the only way to send these souls off," said Jiemi Zhangsuo, head of the area's main Buddhist monastery that handled the ceremony.

But the struggle was far from over for the devastated area of Qinghai province, with 1,484 dead and more than 300 still missing, as authorities fought to get sufficient relief personnel and aid to the isolated region. In contrast with official figures, monks in the overwhelmingly ethnic Tibetan region in China's northwest said they cremated 1,400 people at the ceremony, but AFP could not independently confirm that figure.

Premier Wen Jiabao, who earlier toured the disaster area, has cast the recovery efforts as a chance to foster unity in a region whose Buddhist ethnic Tibetans have a history of chafing at Chinese rule.

The Dalai Lama, who has been labelled a separatist by Beijing and was born in Qinghai province, yesterday appealed to the Chinese authorities to allow him to visit the quake zone, where nearly 12,000 people were injured.

Tibetan Buddhist monks wearing maroon-and-saffron robes have been a prominent part of the rescue effort after last Wednesday's 6.9-magnitude quake, which caused flimsy traditional mud and wood dwellings to collapse.

"To fulfil the wishes of many of the people there, I am eager to go there myself to offer them comfort," the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader said in a statement issued from Dharamshala, his home in northern India.

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet after a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. He has not been back to China since.

He praised the official response to the disaster, "especially Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has not only personally offered comfort to the affected communities, but has also overseen the relief work."

Infrastructure in Jiegu, the main population centre in the quake-hit region, has been shattered, with the water supply "basically paralysed", Xia Xueping, spokesman for relief efforts, told a news briefing in the town.

President Hu Jintao returned to Beijing on Saturday after cutting short an overseas trip due to the quake, cancelling visits to Venezuela and Chile, which is still recovering from its own quake disaster.

About 13,000 rescue personnel had arrived in the region to aid rescue and recovery efforts, pulling more than 1,200 people from the rubble of collapsed buildings and bringing relief supplies, state media reported.