It was a day of grief and despair for those living in Dujiangyan.
This small, ancient town in western Sichuan is known to Chinese because it was where the nation's first engineering wonder was built to fight natural disasters more than 2,000 years ago.
The Dujiang dam, the oldest irrigation and flood-prevention facility in Asia, is hailed by Chinese scholars as an example of man's success in taming nature.
But the town will now be remembered by people across the country for a different reason - the massive earthquake that struck on Monday claiming hundreds of schoolchildren's lives.
Xiang Er Township Middle School was reduced to piles of debris and rubble by the powerful tremor when hundreds of pupils were attending afternoon classes in the four-storey building.
The disaster happened so suddenly and the destruction was so complete, local people were still arguing over how many schoolchildren died in the collapsed building and how many were still buried under the rubble.