AN EARTHQUAKE killed at least 118 people in a cold and mountainous region in north-west China, provincial officials said yesterday, in the nation’s deadliest quake in 10 years.

Emergency authorities in Gansu province issued an appeal for 300 additional workers to comb through collapsed buildings and for other search-and-rescue operations. 

Officials in neighbouring Qinghai reported 20 people missing in a landslide, according to Chinese media.

The magnitude 6.2 earthquake left more than 500 people injured, severely damaged houses and roads and knocked out power and communication lines, provincial officials and media reports said.

It struck just before midnight on Monday near the boundary between the two provinces at a relatively shallow depth of six miles, the China Earthquake Networks Centre said. 

The United States Geological Survey measured the magnitude at 5.9.

By mid-morning, 105 people had been confirmed dead in Gansu and another 397 injured, including 16 in critical condition, a provincial emergency department official said at a news conference. 

Thirteen others were killed and 182 injured in Qinghai in an area north of the epicentre, a local official said at a separate news conference.

The earthquake was felt in much of the surrounding area, including Lanzhou, the Gansu provincial capital, about 60 miles north-east of the epicentre. 

The death toll was the highest since an April 2013 earthquake that killed 196 people in south-west China’s Sichuan province. 

The country’s deadliest earthquake in recent years was a 7.9 magnitude quake in 2008 that killed nearly 90,000 people and devastated towns and schools in Sichuan, leading to an effort to rebuild with more resistant materials.

Last year in September, 93 people were killed in a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that shook China’s south-western province of Sichuan, triggering landslides and shaking buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu.