CHINA:AN EERIE wailing split China's skies at 2.28pm, as car horns blared and air-raid sirens sounded for three minutes to mark a nation's grief, one week after the Sichuan earthquake which killed tens of thousands and left millions homeless, writes Clifford Coonan.
Nerves were further rattled last night after government warnings that fresh aftershocks were expected, including the likelihood of a 7-magnitude tremor at the epicentre of last week's quake at Wenchuan. Residents of the Sichuan capital took to the streets, which were full of cars long past midnight as people sought to get away from the city.
China is a busy place, and it's not easy to get people to down tools and pause to remember in an era of get-rich-quick.
But this tragedy has united a nation in mourning and the remembrance was marked by most of China's 1.3 billion people, from the tent cities in Sichuan province to the vast plaza of Tiananmen Square to the gleaming skyscrapers of Shanghai's commercial districts.
The names of towns such as Beichuan, Wenchuan, Dujiangyan and Hanwang have become synonymous with grief and horror in China since the quake.
Sichuan's plight has touched everyone's hearts. Nearly everyone in China knows someone from Sichuan, a heavily-populated province that is the country's grain basket and home to many of the migrant workers who have helped put up the buildings transforming China.
"I feel sorrow and disappointment when I see the suffering the people of Sichuan have to endure in this earthquake. I gave money, and I think the government and rescue teams have done very well, responding quickly and efficiently," said a businessman from northeastern China, surnamed Wang, who had come to Chengdu to find his missing friends.
The official death toll has risen to more than 34,000, with nearly five million homeless, while the number of dead, missing or buried has soared to 71,000.
In Beijing, the leadership, led by President Hu Jintao, wore white flowers on their chests - white is the traditional mourning colour in China - and bowed their heads in silence.
Earlier in the day, there was a march of about 1,000 people waving flags in Tiananmen Square, singing the national anthem, and chanting "Come on!" and "Let's Rebuild Sichuan". The Olympic torch relay has been suspended during the three-day mourning period.
In Dujiangyan, where hundreds of schoolchildren were killed, relatives of the dead held candles and burned incense to mark the beginning of the mourning period.
One 35-year-old painter, who did not wish to be named, came to Sichuan to work as a volunteer and hopefully, eventually, to convince her friends to go back with her to Beijing. She and her friends had collected more than 200,000 yuan. "I feel such sorrow when I see the pictures on TV. I am so worried about my friends in Sichuan," she said.
In the town of Beichuan, destroyed by the quake measuring a revised higher 8.0 on the Richter scale, hundreds of rescuers bowed their heads and laid wreaths made from twigs and scraps of paper pulled from the debris.
An aftershock rattled the area during the remembrance ceremony, causing landslides and adding to the difficulties for the rescue workers.The bad weather means that rescuers are in constant fear that the rivers blocked by landslides could burst their banks, flooding lakes below and causing even greater catastrophe.
The transport ministry said 200 rescue workers were buried by landslides in the last two days. The quake is China's worst since the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, which claimed 300,000 lives. Nearly a quarter of a million were injured and rescuers have still not reached some of the worst-affected areas.
The foreign ministry appealed to the international community for tents to house the homeless. Tent cities are springing up all over the affected region, housing the refugees, and they are well served and provisioned, but more accommodation will be needed once those rescued from the more remote areas start to trickle in to the bigger towns.
Many of the bodies now being discovered are badly decomposed, and rescue workers spread quicklime and disinfectant around the sites to stop the spread of cholera and diphtheria.
The earthquake has led to a huge outpouring of emotion in China amid blanket media coverage of the disaster.
Miraculously, rescuers yesterday dug up two more survivors after they had been buried under the rubble for up to 164 hours.