China has sent more than 193,000 tents to Sichuan, the southwestern province that was hard hit by a strong earthquake on May 12, a railway ministry official said Monday.

The nation's rail system have carried 145,000, or third-fourth of all the tents, to the quake-battered regions by Monday noon, Wang Yongping, spokesman with the Ministry of Railways, said in an interview on the Web site of the central government (www.gov.cn).

The magnitude 8.0 quake had killed 32,173 people as of 7:00 PM Sunday, with 9,509 more remaining buried and 29,418 missing. The final death toll was estimated to exceed 50,000.

Tents were in urgent need in Sichuan to shelter millions of survivors whose homes collapsed or were damaged beyond repair, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said on Monday.

The quake region is in raining season and hit by 155 aftershocks measuring 4 or higher on the Richter scale as of 1:00 PM Monday following the major earthquake.

Qin called for the international community to offer tents, among other relief donations, to the quake survivors.

China has carried 5,379 trains of relief materials to the quake-hit regions, including 210,000 pieces of medicine, 585,000 quilts and cotton-padded coat, 3.43 million boxes of bottled water and 745,000 boxes of food, Wang said. The trains also took 46,000 soldiers to the regions, he said.

Wang added that the first group of 200 quake injured were evacuated by train Monday morning from Mianyang, Sichuan, to the neighboring municipality of Chongqing for better treatment.

Wang Guoqiang, vice health minister, said 2,000 injured were planned to be evacuated to hospitals in Chongqing, where 5,000 beds in 10 hospitals had been vacated for them.

A three-day national mourning for the quake victims started on Monday, with flags flying at half mast, and three minutes of silence being observed at 2:28 PM, exactly one week from the quake.

(Xinhua News Agency May 19, 2008)