Magnitude-7 earthquake hits Tibet, killing at least 16 and destroying hundreds of homes

A magnitude-7 earthquake has hit Tibet, killing at least 16 people, injuring 54 and collapsing hundreds of homes in the northern regional city of Nagqu, official media have said.

Search and rescue efforts continued after the collapse of at least 339 homes and 20 livestock sheds, the Nagqu media office said, citing city government officials.

More than 1,600 people from the local county were deployed for rescue efforts. Supplies including 1,000 prefabricated housing units and about 3,000 tents and folding beds as well as torches and winter clothing arrived in the region.

The US Geological Survey said the quake occurred at 10.33pm local time on Thursday, with its epicentre 191km (119 miles) east-north-east of Nagqu, in a sparsely populated, high-altitude area of northern Tibet. It put the earthquake’s depth at 18km.

The US agency recorded at least seven aftershocks with magnitude between 4.3 and 5.2, all of them with a depth of 10km, according to its website. Videos posted by China’s national broadcaster CCTV said showed workers running out of restaurants and objects falling off shelves at supermarkets when the quake struck.

China’s official Xinhua news agency said on Friday that communication in some areas hit by the quake was down. Local railway authorities had taken emergency actions to halt trains passing through the region.

More than 300 police officers had been dispatched for relief work while the regional fire and rescue corps has mobilised almost 350 personnel to the affected areas, Xinhua reported. Rescue workers clambered through damaged buildings, some with collapsed roofs, footage on CCTV showed.

The earthquake also caused rockfalls that had forced local authorities to close a section of national highway 317, allowing only emergency, rescue and official support vehicles through as crews worked to clear debris, according to Xinhua. Intermittent snows were expected in the quake region over the next three days, Xinhua said. It was the biggest quake in the region in the past five years, CCTV said.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, called for an all-out effort in the rescue operation and medical relief work.

Nagqu is more than 300km north of Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. Earthquakes are relatively common in China. In January 2025, at least 126 people were killed in one in Tibet’s rural Tingri county.

Tibet is a particularly seismically active area. The high-altitude region was brought under Chinese control in the 1950s and its people, who are predominantly ethnic Tibetans, have had a tense relationship with the authorities in Beijing ever since. As well as being one of the poorest regions on China, many Tibetans reject Beijing-imposed controls on their culture and religion.

In August, a disastrous flood hit the border of Tibet and Nepal. China’s tight grip on information prevented international media from visiting the affected regions on the Tibetan side, obscuring the scale of the damage.

In December 2023, a quake in remote Gansu province in north-west China killed at least 134 people, state media said. That quake was China’s deadliest since 2014, when more than 600 people died in the south-western province of Yunnan.

A huge tremor in Sichuan province in 2008 left approximately 90,000 people dead or missing, including about 5,000 schoolchildren.