A foot of snow was dumped on the worst-hit Zhaosu county near China's rugged border with Kazakhstan, making road travel treacherous and delaying the arrival of rescue staff from Yining City, 300 kilomteres (186 miles) away.

Temperatures plunged to minus 17 degrees Celsius although those made homeless by the 6.1 magnitude tremor have been relocated to warm houses with heating, the Xinhua news agency said.

The Monday morning quake in an area where seismic activity is common left 11 people dead, 26 severely injured and 47 slightly injured, and affected 1,056 people in total, Xinhua said

More than 700 houses collapsed while another 140 were damaged.

Most of the casualties and damage was borne by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a one-time military unit that transferred to civilian work in 1954.

Huang Qilong, head of the 76th agricultural division of the XPCC, said soldiers and police officers were Tuesday dismantling damaged houses to avoid them collapsing.

Many despondent victims were sitting around fires trying to stay warm, he added.

A local official in Zhaosu county, a mainly pastoral area populated by herdsmen, said the quake was so strong it was felt 80 kilometres (49 miles) away in the county's administrative centre.

Earthquakes regularly hit China's Tibetan plateau and Muslim-majority Xinjiang region.

Earlier this year, an earthquake in Xinjiang left more than 260 people dead and thousands more injured.

The worst earthquake in modern Chinese history happened on July 28, 1976, in the northern city of Tangshan when a quake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale killed some 242,000 people.

TERRA.WIRE