China Focus: Tomb Sweeping Day brings tears back to Tangshan 40 yrs after quake

Han Xiuying -- who died with their elder son in an earthquake forty years ago.

Air in Tangshan is filled with sorrow as the Tomb Sweeping Day falls on Monday to bring back memories of loved ones lost in the quake.

A total of 13 black walls stand in the Tangshan Earthquake Ruins Memorial Park. Bearing the names of people killed in the quake, they serve as gravestones as many victims' bodies were never retrieved. The line of 7.28-meter-tall walls extends nearly 500 meters.

Around every Tomb Sweeping Day, about 100,000 people would come to the walls to mourn their dead and leave a sea of flower wreathes and scrolls with elegiac couplets. At night, joss paper fire dots the streets of Tangshan like stars in the sky.

Most people in Tangshan, an industrial city in north China' s Hebei Province, were asleep when the 7.8-magnitude quake stroke at 3:42 a.m. on July 28, 1976. More than 242,000 people were killed, 7,200 whole families died together.

Zhao has commemorated his wife and son for more than a hundred times over the forty years, but he could never let go. He wrote down where his loved ones' names are on the wall on two pieces paper, one for his wife; the other for his son, Zhao Yue, so that he can find them quickly.

After the quake, Zhao raised up their younger son by himself and devoted his life to the research of earthquake-resistent buildings, keeping at it until 75.

Tian Fang, 53, and his grandson took a long-distance bus from rural Tangshan to the memorial park. They placed two wreathes of flowers at the wall.

Tian was 13 when a beam collapsed on his mother and younger brother in front of him. The quake destroyed 97 percent of buildings in Tangshan, reducing the city of about one million people at the time into ruins.

Now Tangshan reemerged as one of the most modern and developed cities in Hebei Province with 7.8 million people.

"It happened when I was a child, now I am a grandfather. But I still miss my mother and younger brother. As my life moves on and gets better, I miss them even more," Tian said.

It's not just sorrow people are feeling in Tangshan. Recalling the help he and his sister received after the quake, 73-year-old Li Baoli's eyes swelled with tears of gratitude. They were transported by air to east China's Jinan to treat their injured legs.

"It was hard times for China. But every one did their best to help us, giving us everything that we could possibly need," Li said. Shop owners offered them goods for free after learning they were survivors of the quake, he recalled.

As Tangshan's hospitals were destroyed, more than 160,000 injured people were transferred to 17 provinces across China for treatment. Today,survivors of the quake have formed groups to look for those who helped them in different parts of China.

Thinking of those kind people, Li dried his tears and smiled. His granddaughter turn from the flower wreathes and demanded, "You told me not to smile, but you are smiling yourself." Endi