Rescuers in south-western China’s mountainous Yunnan province have retrieved nine bodies after a landslide buried 47 people in a remote village, state media said.
Two people were rescued, and by evening about 500 people were evacuated from the area amid freezing temperatures and falling snow.
Rescue crews continued to try and find victims who were buried in about 18 homes after the disaster struck just before 6am local time (11pm on Sunday Irish time) in the village of Liangshui in the north-eastern part of Yunnan, the Zhenxiong county publicity department said.
State media said eight of the bodies were from the group that was initially buried by the landslide, but did not say where the ninth body was found.
The cause of the landslide was not immediately known as survivors and rescuers struggled with snow, icy roads and freezing temperatures that were forecast to persist for at least the next three days.
State broadcaster CCTV put the death toll at nine by 6pm local time (11am GMT), roughly 12 hours after the disaster struck.
Zhengxiong county lies about 1,400 miles south-west of Beijing, with altitudes ranging as high as 7,900ft.
Heavy snow has struck many parts of China, causing transportation chaos and endangering lives.
Last week, rescuers evacuated tourists from a remote skiing area in north-western China where dozens of avalanches triggered by heavy snow had trapped more than 1,000 people for a week.
The avalanches blocked roads, stranding both tourists and residents in a village in Altay prefecture in the Xinjiang region, close to China’s border with Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan.
Landslides, often caused by rain or unsafe construction work, are not uncommon in China. At least 70 people were killed in landslides last year, including more than 50 at an open pit mine in China’s Inner Mongolia region.
In all, natural disasters in China left 691 people dead and missing and last year, causing direct economic losses of about 345 billion yuan (£45 billion), according to the National Commission for Disaster Reduction and the Ministry of Emergency Management.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Natural Resources enacted emergency response measures for geological disasters and sent a work team of experts to the site.
The landslide in Yunnan also came just over a month after China’s most powerful earthquake in years struck the north-west in a remote region between Gansu and Qinghai province. At least 149 people were killed in the magnitude 6.2 tremor that struck on December 18, reducing homes to rubble and triggering heavy mudslides that inundated two villages in Qinghai province.
Nearly 1,000 people were injured and more than 14,000 homes were destroyed in China’s deadliest earthquake in nine years.
