Under a downpour that seemed to never end -- "the heaven is crying" one resident mused -- members of the paramilitary People's Armed Police sifted through the rubble of a nearby office building, dragging out the dead.

An elderly women stepped up in front of one of the bodies, lifted the plastic sheet, and recognised the battered and bruised corpse as her son. She broke down wailing loudly as two women tried to comfort her.

Parts of Dujiangyan -- a town with a population of 60,000 people some 50 kilometres (32 miles) from the quake's epicenter -- looked like it had been the target of an aerial bomb attack.

Broken glass and dust covered shop floors, while a passenger car had been crushed completely by a toppled concrete pillar.

In one part of the town close to the epicenter of Monday's quake in China's Sichuan province, rescuers combed through the rubble of a school, looking for hundreds of students believed to have been buried. Fifty bodies had already been pulled out.

As the residents woke up shivering and cold to a new day Tuesday, the air was filled with the sound of sirens.

Shi Huaigui, a 58-year-old retiree, stood amid the rubble of his devastated town looking for his wife.

Shi had gone to buy groceries, leaving his wife, Cao Dengping, in their modest apartment to do the laundry, repeating the happy routines of their marriage of four decades.

"As I was walking back, the earth started swinging to and fro, and I knew immediately what had happened," said Shi, speaking in the distinct dialect of southwest China's Sichuan province.

A day after the worst quake to hit China in three decades left tens of thousands of people dead or missing, Shi was standing in front of the confused mass of collapsed walls, shattered window frames and muddied curtains that was his home.

Somewhere in there was his wife.

"All I'm asking is that someone come and start going through the rubble and dig out the bodies," he said.

Shi had spent the night in the open, sheltered from the relentless rain by a jacket provided by good friends.

Thousands of others in the city slept outside too, either because they did not want to go home for fear of aftershocks, or because they no longer had any home to return to.

"We don't have anything. Nothing to eat or to use as shelter. No one cares about us," said a middle-aged man, soaking wet after a night in a small park across from his former home.

Doctors and nurses worked frantically in a makeshift clinic -- a tent set up in the middle of the road -- making do with what little they had at their disposal.

"We've been treating 200 injured and received 24 dead, and that's just in this district," said a doctor who declined to be named.

"There has been no preparation whatsoever. It's really tough."

The major road leading into Dujiangyan was filled with a kilometre-long traffic jam in both directions as rescue vehicles tried to get in, and those who could attempted to get out.

Any ticket out of the city was in demand. A yellow pickup truck moved slowly down the street, already filled with passengers, but followed by a tail of other begging to come along.

Amid the noise and the chaos stood 38-year-old Wen Xiaobing oblivious to everything apart from the heap covered by a plastic sheet in front of him.

The heap was his mother, 61-year-old Fu Qunyi, dug out from the rubble the night before.

"I lost everything. I lost my house and I lost my mother," said Wen.

"My brother is in hospital with severe injuries to his chest. I'm waiting for someone to come and pick up the body. But no-one has come yet," he said, stoic like most other men here. And then he started sobbing.

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