BEIJING - PREMIER Wen Jiabao has warned winter will bring hardship for people in China's quake zone, as he indicated the confirmed death toll from the disaster was over 80,000, state media said on Wednesday.

On a trip to southwest China's Sichuan province on Tuesday to mark 110 days since the 8.0-magnitude quake struck there, Wen said the rebuilding of homes and infrastructure remained the most urgent task, the People's Daily reported.

Speaking to journalists in Yingxiu, the epicentre of the May 12 earthquake, he warned of problems in the upcoming winter, when the average temperature will be 10 degrees Celsius.

'We have plans to quicken the rebuilding of homes in the quake-hit areas, but we just cannot rebuild all damaged houses before we enter winter,' he was quoted as saying by the paper, the Communist Party's mouthpiece.

Mr Wen told reporters that the number of dead came to over 80,000, suggesting the official death toll would increase dramatically from the current tally of 69,226 dead, with another 17,923 missing.

China's State Council did not respond to an enquiry seeking to clarify the death toll. The official Xinhua news agency's latest reports on the quake maintained figures of about 69,000 dead and 18,000 missing.

In a rare piece of good news for the area, the final section of the highway between Dujiangyan and Wenchuan, two towns severely hit by the quake, reopened to traffic for the first time since May - a move praised by Wen.

'Some experts said it would take between one and two years to rebuild the highway,' he said, according to the People's Daily.

'I didn't expect it to be rebuilt within 100 days.' Wen's visit came after a 6.2-magnitude earthquake rocked a mountainous region that spans Sichuan and neighbouring Yunnan province on Saturday, killing 38 people and injuring 865.

Officials at China's seismological bureau warned on Wednesday that another serious earthquake of magnitude 5.0 or 6.0 could hit the same area, adding that Saturday's tremor was not an aftershock, but a separate quake.

The biggest difficulty faced by authorities in the region was the approach of winter, said Mr Pang Chenmin, an official at the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

'This (latest) earthquake took place at the end of August, and the weather will soon grow cold, so the issue of the affected population getting through the winter is our most pressing problem at the moment,' he said. -- AFP