Adversaries unite in China quake search

The central government has poured in troops and equipment to this remote western region, but it is the influential Buddhist monks residents trust with their lives — and with their dead.

As the death toll climbed to at least 1,144, there was tension and some distrust over the government relief effort, with survivors scuffling over limited aid.

“They have a relaxed attitude,’’ said Genqiu, a 22-year-old monk at the Jiegu monastery, of the government-sent rescue workers. “If someone’s taking their photo, then they might dig once or twice.’’

Since Wednesday’s quakes, government relief efforts have been slowed by heavy traffic on the single main road from the Qinghai provincial capital, 12 hours away. Yesterday, heavy equipment finally arrived.

“The disaster you suffered is our disaster. Your suffering is our suffering,’’ Premier Wen Jiabao said in remarks broadcast repeatedly on state television.

Though the government was reaching out, many residents turned to the monks and their traditions rather than to a central authority dominated by the majority Han Chinese. The groups are divided by language — the government has had to mobilize hundreds of Tibetan speakers to communicate with victims — as well as culture and religion.

Cultural differences might have contributed to yesterday’s sharp rise in the death toll. In a telephone call with the Associated Press yesterday, rescue officials seemed surprised to hear that hundreds of bodies were at the Jiegu monastery, taken there by Buddhist families. The new official death toll was announced hours later.

It wasn’t clear whether tensions over the relief effort were driven by longtime suspicions of the government or by the stress of living outside for three days in the freezing air and digging for loved ones with bare hands. Many buildings in the town collapsed in the quakes; countless others are unsafe.

Residents of the largely Tibetan town pointed out repeatedly that after the series of earthquakes Wednesday, the monks were the first to come to their aid — pulling people from the rubble and distributing their own limited supplies.

Tibetans traditionally perform sky burials, which involve chopping a body into pieces and leaving it on a platform to be devoured by vultures. But Genqiu, who like many Tibetans goes by one name, said that would be impossible now.

“The vultures can’t eat them all,’’ he said at Jiegu monastery, where bodies were carefully wrapped in colorful blankets and piled three or four deep on a platform.

More than 200 monks chanted in the late-afternoon sun in preparation for a mass cremation on a nearby mountaintop today. In two blue government tents stamped “disaster relief,’’ hundreds of candles burned on a makeshift altar.

One monk estimated that 1,000 bodies were brought to a hillside clearing in the shadow of the monastery. Gerlai Tenzing said a precise count was difficult because bodies continued to arrive and families had taken some away.

Yesterday, some survivors competed for the limited aid. A line of police held back anxious sunburned residents as aid workers unloaded packets of noodles, tents, and other supplies.

“I saw trucks almost attacked by local people because of the lack of food and shelter,’’ said Pierre Deve, program director at a community development organization, the Snowland Service Group. “It started yesterday, but you still see some things like this today. It’s getting better. Chinese authorities are doing well.’’

Still, he said his aid group was relocating outside town in case things got worse.

A few people were still being found alive. China Central Television reported that a 13-year-old girl was pulled from a toppled two-story hotel after a sniffer dog alerted rescuers. And the state news agency Xinhua said a 43-year-old woman was rescued after being trapped for 50 hours with no food or water.