At 10:33 on Thursday night, Maru township was mostly asleep. The ground under Baqen county, high in Tibet’s Nagqu region, had other plans. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake tore through the sparsely populated highlands, killing at least 16 people and triggering a rescue operation that is now racing an enemy nobody can negotiate with: the cold. The Tibet earthquake is the strongest to strike the area in five years, state broadcaster CCTV said, per Mathrubhumi, and its full toll remains unclear because whole stretches of the quake zone are still cut off from the world.
What happened that night
The epicentre lay in Maru township, within Baqen county of Nagqu, a prefecture-level city in northern Tibet, Chinese state media reported. The China Earthquake Networks Center put the quake’s depth at about 10 kilometres; the US Geological Survey recorded 18 kilometres and placed the epicentre roughly 191 kilometres east-northeast of Nagqu. Around the epicentre, the average elevation is about 4,864 metres, close to 16,000 feet. The CENC said the shaking was clearly felt across the local area. Aftershocks of magnitude 3 to 4 have rattled the surrounding region since, per CENC data. Nagqu sits more than 300 kilometres north of the Tibetan capital Lhasa, and the epicentre was around 400 kilometres from the city, state media said.
The Tibet earthquake, by the numbers
Xinhua, citing Nagqu City’s emergency management bureau, reported 16 people killed. The injury count is where the numbers split: Xinhua reported 32 injured, while the Associated Press, citing official Chinese media, put it at at least 46, with 11 in serious condition. At least 339 homes and 20 livestock sheds collapsed, the Nagqu media office said, per AP. More than 1,600 people from the local county have been deployed for search and rescue. Around 3,000 tents, 1,000 prefabricated housing units, folding beds, flashlights and winter clothing have reached the region. More than 12,000 people have been relocated to safer ground, Xinhua reported. A portion of National Highway 317 is closed to everything except emergency and rescue vehicles after rockfalls, and local railway authorities have halted trains running through the region. Communication remains down across parts of the zone, Xinhua said.
Why the casualty count keeps shifting
Here is the honest part. Depending on which state outlet you read, the injured number 32, 46 or 65. That is not sloppy reporting; it is what a communications blackout looks like in real time. Electricity and telephone networks collapsed in the county seat, Xinhua said. Local authorities have so far found only two injured people in a village near the epicentre, with houses closest to it showing cracks, CCTV reported. Videos on state television showed diners bolting from restaurants and goods tumbling off supermarket shelves. One resident said the shaking woke them and they could hear the house squeaking. Maru township deputy head Lhawang Dagpo said the quake was clearly felt at the township office, whose walls cracked.
A region that knows this script
The Himalayan belt has lived this before. In 2010, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Yushu in the neighbouring Qinghai province, killing at least 2,698 people and leaving nearly 300 missing, Reuters reported. The difference this time is the setting: a thinly populated plateau at nearly 5,000 metres, where the first night after a quake is not just about rubble but about temperature. Rescue convoys photographed by state media showed officers packing supplies onto trucks in the dark and inspecting collapsed buildings with flashlights, the Nagqu police department said in a WeChat post, per the Jerusalem Post.
October has already delivered its share of deadly incidents closer home, from the Kolkata Durga Puja stampede that killed 19 to the Mumbai Kurla fire that sent nine people to hospital. The Tibet quake is a different scale of disaster, but it carries the same early pattern: a shifting toll, a blackout zone, and rescuers working against the clock.
By Friday morning, the operation had visibly shifted from search to shelter: tents at a primary school, relocated families, winter clothing moving in. The death toll stands at 16. But in a blackout zone at nearly 5,000 metres, the number that matters most is the one nobody can give yet: how many villages the rescue teams still have not reached.