Tibetans have been mourning their dead with a mass cremation after an earthquake devastated part of northwest China this week.
The death toll reached 1,144 with 417 missing, Xinhua news agency said, after a 6.9-magnitude quake hit Yushu county in Qinghai province, where most residents are ethnic Tibetans.
Thousands of people converged on a hillside cremation site, where a convoy of trucks took many hundreds of bodies that had been kept at the main local monastery.
Many wept and chanted as crimson-gowned monks lit the piles of bodies covered in yak oil, wood and old tires.
Hundreds of monks droned prayer-chants as the flames rose above the trenches, sending a column of smoke into the sky.
Before the cremation, some monks higher up on the hillside oversaw a small 'sky burial', when parts of the dead were fed to the vultures, who were later seen circling through the smoke billowing from the hillside fire.
Monks officiating at the cremation said they burnt about 1,300 bodies in the ceremony, a figure exceeding the official number.
Nuoya, a monk helping oversee the cremation, said many of the victims may not have been registered by the government.
Others remain buried beneath crumpled buildings. Several people were pulled out alive from rubble this morning, state television said.
