A magnitude-7 earthquake has hit Tibet, killing at least 16 people, injuring 54 and destroying hundreds of homes in the northern regional city of Nagqu, official media have said.

Search and rescue efforts continued after at least 339 homes and 20 livestock sheds collapsed, the Nagqu media office said, citing city government officials. It was the biggest quake in the region in the past five years, according to China’s national broadcaster CCTV.

More than 1,600 people from the local county were deployed to help rescue efforts. Supplies were also sent into the region, including 1,000 prefabricated housing units, about 3,000 tents, folding beds, torches and winter clothing.

The US Geological Survey said the quake occurred at 10.33pm local time on Thursday, with its epicentre 119 miles (191km) east-north-east of Nagqu, in a sparsely populated, high-altitude area of northern Tibet. It put the earthquake’s depth at 11 miles.

The agency recorded at least seven aftershocks of magnitudes between 4.3 and 5.2, all of them with a depth of 6 miles. Videos posted by CCTV showed workers running out of restaurants and objects falling off shelves at supermarkets when the quake struck.

China’s official Xinhua news agency said on Friday that communication in some areas hit by the quake was down. Local railway authorities had taken emergency actions to stop trains passing through the region.

More than 300 police officers were dispatched for relief work while the regional fire and rescue services had sent almost 350 personnel to the affected areas, Xinhua reported. Rescue workers clambered through damaged buildings, some with collapsed roofs, footage on CCTV showed.

The earthquake caused rockfalls, forcing local authorities to close a section of national highway 317, allowing only emergency, rescue and official support vehicles through as crews worked to clear debris, according to Xinhua. Intermittent snow was expected in the region over the next three days, Xinhua said.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, called for an all-out effort in the rescue operation and medical relief work.

Nagqu is more than 185 miles north of Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. Earthquakes are relatively common in China. In January 2025, at least 126 people were killed in one in Tibet’s rural Tingri county.

In August, a disastrous flood hit the border of Tibet and Nepal. China’s tight grip on information prevented international media from visiting the affected regions on the Tibetan side, obscuring the scale of the damage.

In December 2023, a quake in remote Gansu province in north-west China killed at least 134 people, state media said. That quake was China’s deadliest since 2014, when more than 600 people died in the south-western province of Yunnan.

Tibet is a particularly seismically active area. The high-altitude region was taken under Chinese control in the 1950s and its people, who are predominantly ethnic Tibetans, have had a tense relationship with the authorities in Beijing since. As well as being one of the poorest regions in China, many Tibetans reject Beijing-imposed controls on their culture and religion.

Agence France-Presse contribute to this report