The deadly earthquake that rocked Southwestern China and felt all across China and beyond, had left nearly 10,000 people dead by midnight Monday, and the death toll is expected to climb as rescue efforts are intensifying.

And in the neighboring provinces as Gansu and Shanxi, nearly 200 were confirmed dead, according to a Xinhua report.

Xinhua said in a news flash that in Sichuan Province alone, which was hit the hardest, the death toll there has risen to nearly 10,000.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, who had just completed a 5-day official visit to Japan, has ordered prompt rescue efforts to take care of the affected. Premier Wen Jiabao has cut short his inspection trip in central Henan Province, and have flown to Chengdu to lead the government rescue efforts.

Late Monday evening, President Hu urged governments at all levels to regard relieving major quake as the top priority at a Politburo standing committee meeting on late Monday evening.

Presided over by Hu, the meeting called on disaster relieving personnel to go to the quake hit areas as soon as possible and mount all-out efforts to save the injured.

And in Dujiangyan, Premier Wen Jiabao has pledged to save as many lives as the rescue teams can in southwest China's Sichuan Province which was hit by a major quake on Monday afternoon.

Wen inspected a hospital and a school in Dujiangyan, a city northwest of the provincial capital Chengdu, partly damaged by the quake.

Up to 900 teenagers were trapped as buildings of Juyuan Middle School partly collapsed. Rescuers are seen in TV footage using cranes to move away cement and steel structures. Rescuers had recovered at least 60 bodies from the debris, according to Xinhua.

Officials in the Xiang'e Township middle school in Dujiangyan, about 100 km from epicenter Wenchuan, said fewer than 100 students out of 420 students survived after a powerful quake brought down a major teaching buildings in the school.

The road from Dujiangyan to Wenchuan, epicenter of the quake, was blocked by rock and mud slides, holding up rescue, medical and other disaster relief teams in the city.

"Please just hold on, people are going to get you out of there! " the Premier told the people trapped in the collapsed buildings of the hospital in a loudspeaker.

When comforting patients and medical staffs in the hospital, Wen asked rescuing troops to search every corner for people waiting for salvation and carry out the rescue work in an orderly way.

"If there is a gleam of hope, we will do all the best to save the people," Wen vowed at a middle school of Juyuan town, adding that the rescuing team would not rest until the last one under the ruin was saved.

"The medical experts are coming, the rescuing planes will land soon," Wen told people crying for help in the school, "I was told many trapped people have hopes to survive from the disaster."

He made a three-time bow to pay his respect to the bodies of the people killed by the quake laid on the school's square, saying that he was very depressed.

Premier Wen told officials at the temporary headquarters for disaster relief in Dujiangyan that roads to Wenchuan should be recovered as soon as possible at all costs.

"The road is the key for the relief work since we can only know the situation there when we can send people and we can only transport the injured out when the road is clean," Wen said.

China's state seimological administration reported the earthquake hit Sichuan Province at 2:28 pm Beijing Time Monday, at a destructive scale of 7.8 on the Richter calculations. The US Geologocial Survey said on its website that the epicentre lies 29 kilometres below the surface, and at a scale of 7.5.

More than 5,000 PLA officers and soliders and 3,000 police have also rushed to Wenchuan and surrounding areas to spearhead the rescue efforts.

Premier Wen told reporters during his flight to Sichuan that the central government is closely monitoring the disaster relief work, and Wen urged for calm, efficiency and confidence in fighting the killer tremor.
"I will be in charge of relief work headquarters that has been set up with eight State Council departments," Wen said.

Chinese reporters in Juyuan town, about 60 miles from the epicenter, said that they saw trapped teenagers struggling to break loose from underneath the rubble of the three-story building "while others were crying out for help."

Two teenage girl students were quoted as saying they escaped because they had "run faster than others."