Before Monday's 7.9-magnitude earthquake tore apart this valley town in southwestern China, the 34-year-old was a tea salesman.

Starting on Tuesday, he donned military fatigues, a face mask and a red armband marking him as a volunteer trying to find survivors of his former neighbourhood.

He says that his team has saved some 700 people. But so far not his wife or their parents.

'I no longer have a wife and I lost my house. All I've got are the clothes that I'm wearing,' he says with a blank look behind his small oval glasses.

He had tried in vain to call his wife by mobile telephone.

'It's hopeless,' he says, standing on a pile of clothes and other assorted objects left from his once happy life, including pictures of him with his wife.

'They're down here,' he says of his wife and in-laws, looking at the ground.

One hundred metres away, soldiers hauling a stretcher race to safety with an injured person. But the task is made all the more difficult for the lack of ambulances.

Bulldozers are trying to open up a pathway through the mountains as the onetime road has been completely destroyed.

Mr Tang Jun, 28, another volunteer, managed to come here by foot from Mianyang, some 80km away in the plains where he works in computers at a technical school.

'I knew this place as I had been before. There was a river and a road and there was a neighbourhood here, but it's become a strange place for me,' Mr Tang says, clad in the overalls and helmet of a volunteer.

He is taking part in relief operations alongside some of the first foreigners to be on the ground, Americans who were already based in Sichuan province with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

'This morning our team saved four people but as time goes on our hopes are fading,' Mr Tang said on Thursday.

Residents are not giving up hope in Beichuan, where everywhere people head to the former apartments or offices of their loved ones in the chance of good news.

One woman cannot stop crying. Soldiers have just pulled out the body of her husband, who was trapped underneath a slab of concrete.

An American rescue worker comes close and asks in Chinese, 'Is he alive?' 'He's dead,' a soldier replies to her.

The woman goes back to her grim work of finding more survivors while the soldiers take away the man's body on a door that has become a makeshift stretcher.

Elsewhere, two policemen use electric wires to cover up another corpse.

Near a building that is half destroyed, a rescue worker rushes over as he hears a knocking sound in the rubble. He gets out equipment to find where it is coming from. But there was no more knocking. -- AFP