At least 111 people have been killed and 220 others sustained injuries following an earthquake on Monday night in north-west China, state media report said.
The quake measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale with a depth of 10km (six miles) struck Gansu province around midnight (16:00 GMT), damaging buildings there and in neighboring Qinghai province, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered full rescue efforts. "All efforts should be made to carry out search and rescue, treat the injured in a timely manner, and minimize casualties," President Xi said in a statement.
Emergency workers are braving freezing weather to try and help people in the rural region that lies between the Tibetan and Loess plateaus and borders Mongolia where the temperatures are below minus 13C, local media outlets said.
State media agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday morning that 100 people had been killed and 96 injured in Gansu, while 11 were killed and 124 injured in Qinghai.
China sits in a region where a number of tectonic plates - notably the Eurasian, Indian and Pacific plates - meet, and is particularly prone to earthquakes.
Last September, more than 60 people were killed when a 6.6-magnitude quake hit the southwestern Sichuan province.
A 1920 earthquake in Gansu, which killed more than 200,000 people, is also recorded as one of the world's deadliest in the 20th century.
