Chinese people continued to mourn victims of last week's earthquake on Tuesday and show support to help quake-stricken people pull through.

At 1:40 PM Tuesday, around 10,000 people gathered under the national flag which flew at half mast at Tian'anmen Square in the center of Beijing, shouting slogans of "Go China" and "Go Sichuan".

The scene was similar to the one on Monday, the first day of a three day national mourning.

"With the support of the whole country, the Sichuan people will pull through," said Wang Hui, who just arrived in Beijing by train from Tangshan, a Hebei Province city which was hit by a devastating 7.8 magnitude quake in 1976.

"Thank the motherland and the people, and let us unite and combat the disaster together," read a paper board held highly by a man surnamed Xu, who came from Mianyang, a city severely affected by the 8.0 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan Province.

Xu, dressed in white, passed through crowded people with the slogan board to show his sincere thanks to everyone. Tears could be seen swelling in his eyes.

A dead quietness suddenly fell when it was 2:28 PM, the exact moment when the quake rocked Sichuan on May 12. All the crowds stood in silence to mourn the victims. At the same moment on Monday, Chinese nationwide observed three minutes of silence, with air raid sirens and horns of cars, trains and ships wailing in grief to mourn them.

At the same moment, in a campus square thousands of kilometers away, hundreds of students and teachers also gathered in Sichuan University to mourn the dead.

"I have been paying close attention to the disaster relief progress every day and often moved to tears," said Wang Huan, a postgraduate in life science.

"I feel very sad about the deaths of our compatriots," she said. "The best commemoration is that everyone does well his or her own work."

"Today we come to mourn them again."

Donations and aid

The death toll from the massive earthquake rose to 40,075 nationwide as of 6:00 PM on Tuesday, while 247,645 people were injured, according to the Information Office of the State Council.

As mourning continued, people and institutions at home and abroad continued donations and aid to help quake-affected people.

On Tuesday, a donation of 500,000 yuan (US$71,000) from faculties and students of two schools in Tianjin Municipality was transferred to the Sichuan Educational Fund. The donation will be used to build a middle school and a primary school in Dujiangyan, a worst-hit city in Sichuan.

A team of 28 medical volunteers from Tianjin also left for Sichuan on Tuesday. They will carry out rescue, nursing and psychological aid there.

Farmers also joined the relief efforts.

In a vegetable base in Guizhou Province, which neighbors Sichuan, 30 farmers have managed to ship 16 tonnes of vegetables they grow to quake-hit Sichuan, with the help of local government.

"We donated money a few days ago, but I saw the quake-affected people lacked vegetables to eat," said Song Dati, a vegetable grower.

"For us farmers, we do not have so much money, but we have vegetables in our fields. We can donate vegetables to them."

By Tuesday noon, donations to quake-hit regions had reached 13.925 billion yuan (US$2.01 billion) with 12.516 billion yuan in cash and 1.408 billion yuan in relief supplies.

(Xinhua News Agency May 21, 2008)