WUZHOU (REUTERS, BLOOMBERG) - As recovery crews sifted through the mud at the China Eastern Airlines crash site, dozens of relatives of those on board flight MU5735 remained nearby in an anxious wait for further news.  

One was Mr Qin Haitao who comes from neighbouring Hunan province. Mr Qin’s daughter, Shujun, was a passenger on the flight on Monday (March 21) that had been en-route from the southwestern inland city of Kunming to the southeastern coastal city of Guangzhou, when it plummeted to the ground in a rural part of the Guangxi region, leaving no known survivors.  

Guangzhou-based migrant worker Shujun, 40, had travelled to Kunming to accompany her mother to see a specialist doctor she had heard was very good.  

“We couldn’t believe it and didn’t dare say anything, for fear that my wife would not be able to bear it,” Mr Qin said, when describing the moment he heard the news of the crash on Monday.  

“Our eyes were full of tears but we dared not weep. In fact, we knew the truth, but we kept it from her for a night, for half a day plus one night.”

A manifest of the 123 passengers and nine crew aboard the China Eastern Airlines Corp. has yet to be released for privacy reasons, the jet's flight data recorder hasn't been found and officials haven't ruled out the possibility that the Boeing Co. 737-800 NG's cockpit voice recorder, retrieved on Wednesday and sent to Beijing for decoding, was badly damaged upon impact.

Mr Qin said he initially received no official confirmation about his daughter’s situation. But on Monday night his brother-in-law rushed to Guangzhou’s Baiyun International Airport, where the flight was scheduled to arrive. There, he was shown a list of the passengers’ names, which included Shujun’s. On Tuesday, Mr Qin, his son and two others drove to Wuzhou and the next day visited the crash site accompanied by staff and volunteers from China Eastern.  

“It’s so painful,” he said in a broken voice, holding back tears. “We have nothing but grief now…We are living in grief every day.”

Another family member of a passenger, who declined to give his name, said he's been waiting for days - police have set up a checkpoint on a road about 40km (25 miles) outside of downtown Wuzhou near the crash site, restricting public access. Only cars with the right government license plates can get in.

By 10am on Friday, 375 family members of the 132 people on board flight MU5735 had visited the crash site, officials said.  

Rescue workers have reported finding human remains, pieces of personal belongings of the passengers and debris from the plane.  

"If they have died, we want to see the body," the father of Zhang Xu, an 18-year-old university student who was on the flight, told local media. "It's sad. I'm really sad. My wife told me to bring something back to remember our son by," he said as tears flowed.

Mr Qin said about the visit to the crash site: “Many family members were burning incense. I prayed and put my daughter’s name there. It happened to be her birthday that same day...so I said: ‘Dad came to see you, my child. Happy birthday.’”

After that visit to the site, Mr Qin has largely stayed at his hotel with his son, Shujun’s elder brother and only sibling. Shujun herself leaves behind a teenage daughter.  

“We don’t have any requests now,” Qin said. “Our only request is to find my daughter’s body as soon as possible and bring her home.”

State-run media outlet Xinhua has been broadcasting a live stream on Weibo of the recovery efforts, intermittently. Hundreds of people dressed in white protective gear can be seen combing the scene, shovelling mud and picking up debris for bagging. On Thursday, after heavy rain earlier in the week, the ground was so wet firefighters had to link arms to keep from slipping over.

Outside of the crash-site entrance, largely closed off with blue hoardings, locals aren't much more enlightened.

"I haven't seen this kind of situation in my life. It's usually very quiet here in this small village," said a grocery store owner surnamed Liu, whose small shop is right outside along the road. He heard the loud noise from the crash on Monday afternoon and saw rescue teams, security and police start to rush by and up into the mountains within the hour.

All the attention has left other villagers bemused. "What's going on in there," asked one on Friday. "Why are there so many people?"

One local photographer summed it up. "When so many foreign journalists piled into our small county amid the rain and storm on Tuesday, villagers didn't even know the biggest news in the country had happened, right here."