Strong, shallow earthquake rocks China's Yunnan province

A strong, shallow earthquake shook southwestern China overnight, killing at least one person, damaging buildings and prompting thousands to camp outside as aftershocks continued to strike the area, officials said Wednesday.

The earthquake with a magnitude of at least 6.0 hit the Weiyuan city area of Yunnan province at 9:49 p.m. when most residents would have been in their homes. At least 324 people were injured, eight of them seriously, said the provincial government of Yunnan, a region prone to earthquakes.

State radio initially reported that five people had been killed and more than 20 injured.

"The whole building was shaking terribly with a loud cracking sound. Plates fell off in the kitchen," the official state Xinhua News Agency quoted Weiyuan resident Li Anqin as saying. "We all ran out and the streets now are packed with people."

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake measured magnitude 6.0 at a depth of 6.3 miles. Its shallow focus was likely to cause greater damage, but there were no immediate reports of serious destruction.

China's national earthquake monitoring agency gave the quake's magnitude as 6.6 and said it struck just 3.1 miles below the surface. It said the quake was followed by eight aftershocks, the strongest of which registered at magnitude 4.2.

The official People's Daily said Yunnan is home to about 300,000 people, most of them members of ethnic minorities.

More that 1,000 rescuers, including soldiers, were on their way to the scene, with tents, blankets and other relief materials state television reported.

The official Xinhua news agency said shaking could be felt in the provincial capital of Yunnan, Kunming, as well as several other major cities in the province.

The epicenter, Jinggu county, is in a remote, largely rural and mountainous part of Yunnan.

Worst hit was the town of Yongping, 3 miles from the epicenter, where some houses had collapsed, Xinhua said.

Residents of a community near a 2-square-mile reservoir in Jinggu were evacuated after the reservoir's dam was found to have a 3-inch-wide crack that was leaking water following the quake. Officials were assessing the risk to the dam and seeing about repairs, said a Jinggu county official who gave only his surname, Yao.

Pictures on Xinhua's Weibo microblog showed smashed tiles and bricks on the ground in one village, with cracks in the walls of some of the low-rise houses.

The area is prone to earthquakes.

A 6.1-magnitude quake in northern Yunnan in August killed at least 615 people and left more than 100 others missing. In 1970, a magnitude-7.7 earthquake in Yunnan killed at least 15,000 people.

A 2008 quake in Sichuan killed at least 70,000 people, at least 5,000 of them children because poorly built schools collapsed. In the aftermath, critics accused the government of constructing some infrastructure in violation of building codes, exacerbating the damage.

Al Jazeera and wire services