Although thousands were evacuated from buildings in Beijing and Shanghai, for me the swaying ceiling lamps and window blinds (and my barking dog) were my only hints of the earthquake that hit eastern Sichuan province at 2:29 PM local time. Now we hear the temblor was 7.9 on the Richter scale and that state media are reporting that as many as 5,000 people were killed in a single county. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, 80 percent of the buildings collapsed in Beichuan county in Sichuan province, with 900 high school students said to be trapped in the rubble of their building. The U.S. Geological Survey says it took place 93 kilometers (about 56 miles) northwest of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu.

Chengdu's a city of 10 million with all the tall buildings, crowded streets and dense urban malls that characterize modern Chinese metropolises. I've been trying to phone friends and sources in Chengdu and another Sichuan city, Mianyang, but so far no luck on either land lines or mobiles. According to its Web site, Chengdu's Shuangliu airport was closed temporarily for safety reasons after the quake.

Sichuan lies in an area of considerable seismological activity. A 4.7 quake hit an area in western Sichuan's Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture February 27, according to the Sichuan Seismological Monitoring Network; official reports say it caused nearly US$20 million in damages to 220 villages. A 3.7 temblor hit the same general area February 16. (The last major quake to hit China was on March 21 when a 7.2 magnitude quake struck the Central Asian city of Hotian, also known as Khotan, a cultural and economic center for members of the  Muslim Uighur minority in far western Xinjiang province.)

Now here's a coincidence: I just wrote a story for the magazine about superstition and disasters. Many Asians see major calamities as examples of "divine intervention" -- such as the recent Burmese cyclone which many citizens there interpreted as karmic payback for the military junta's bloody crackdown on monk-led protests back in September. My piece mentioned China's traumatic July 1976 Tangshan earthquake, in which up to 600,000 died.

The Tangshan quake, which took place in July of that year, was widely perceived as a portent that the ailing dictator Mao Zedong would die (he did in September) and that the Maoist era of isolationist rule would end (it did beginning in October, when the ultra-leftist "Gang of Four" was toppled). So many big political events took place in 1976 that Chinese called it the "year of curses." With all the drama over China's Olympic torch relay, and anticipation growing over the August Games, authorities no doubt hope today's earthquake will prove to be just a seismological blip.

UPDATE: Twelve hours later, China's official death toll is awful: nearly 9,000 dead and at least 10,000 injured. I finally talked to friends in Chengdu, the provincial capital (about 90 kilometers--almost 60 miles--from the epicenter at Wenchuan). China Mobile says telecoms disruptions were due partly to the fact that more than 2,300 mobile phone towers collapsed in the quake --  but it's still possible to send cellphone text-messages to Chengdu residents requesting that they call out (which many can now do). 

Restauranteur and photographer Leo Chen said Chengdu wasn't so terribly affected. Swaying buildings and evacuation of hospital wards. "Gas stations stopped selling petrol due to safety concerns, and the possibility of aftershocks," he said. However huge boulders dislodged by landslides are blocking roads to Wenchuan, and authorities are turning back outsiders who don't live in that area. Leo said some travellers managed to reach another badly affected location, Dujiangyan, north of Chengdu. Xinhua says a school collapse trapped 900 students in debris at one township there. Photographers were taking pictures of childrens' corpses in the rubble. State media's also reporting 80 tons of toxic ammonia spilled when a chemical plant in Shifang was damaged; 6,000 people evacuated.

Tonight I talked with the Czech Ambassador to Beijing. The Czech Republic has officially offered to send a 15-person team specially trained for earthquake search-and-rescue work to the affected area -- the first foreign government to formally offer assistance to Beijing.

The disaster's severity was updated to 7.9 on the Richter scale. That makes it China's most deadly temblor since the July 28,1976 Tangshan quake, when government officials initially reported 655,000 deaths but later downgraded the death toll to less than 255,000. The Wenchuan epicenter is in Sichuan's Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, where ethnic Tibetans are the majority. Wenchuan is also home to the world-renowned Wolong panda reserve, where 1,200 of the endangered animals reside. Wolong is a breathtakingly beautiful natural setting; it's hard to think about so much suffering in paradise.