JUYUAN (SICHUAN) - NUMB with grief, parents and family members waited in silence as rescue workers pulled one teenage corpse after another from the wreckage of Juyuan Secondary School.

All it took was a single tell-tale sign - a bag, a shoe or a shirt - for hearts to shatter as the lifeless body of a son or daughter was recognised.

The wailing would draw other parents to crowd around, as if to make sure the victim was not their child.

Equally inconsolable, the boy's grandfather, Mr Liu Zhoubo, said between sobs that he had waited without food or sleep since Monday afternoon for news of Dingxian.

I arrived at the school yesterday afternoon to find these wrenching scenes of immeasurable loss repeated over and over again.

Juyuan Secondary is where 900 students were feared buried under rubble after the school collapsed during Monday's powerful earthquake.

The school was due to send off a new graduating class later this month. Yesterday, its grounds were a makeshift mortuary.

As the rain beat down relentlessly, a new victim was carried into a tent at the edge of a muddy field every few minutes.

The school, about 130km from the epicentre of the 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan province's Wenchuan county, was the most badly damaged building in Juyuan township, residents said.

One of the school's four-storey buildings was said to have collapsed inwards, trapping students before they could escape. But shell-shocked teachers could not verify this version, or even confirm the school's enrolment.

The young appeared to have borne much of the brunt of the devastating earthquake which happened at 2.28pm, when classes were in full swing.

Several other schools in Sichuan and those in neighbouring provinces also reported considerable casualties.

In Sichuan's Mianyang City and Hawang Township, a total of about 1,200 students and teachers have been reported dead or missing.

In Chongqing municipality and Guizhou province, dozens of primary school pupils were killed after school buildings collapsed.

By yesterday, the toll had soared past 12,000, state media reported. But a Chinese official I met told me in the morning that the undisclosed death toll is already twice that figure, though the government was still trying to verify statistics pouring in from stricken regions.

The eventual death toll is expected to be much higher, given that rescuers have yet to find out what had happened to worst-hit Wenchuan and its population of more than 110,000 people.

Several rescue teams were expected to reach Wenchuan on foot last night, after incessant rain and damaged roads prevented them from getting there sooner.

Although the Chinese government mobilised resources swiftly, there was a palpable sense of anger among parents of students at Juyuan Secondary at the rate of search-and-rescue efforts.

'It is going too slowly,' said Mr Dong Xiangshen, 39, as he sat slumped in a chair facing his 14-year-old son's body, wrapped up in blankets and towels.

The family lit candles and placed them at the boy's feet as offerings.

Other families lit firecrackers in an apparent bid to ward off evil spirits.

As another body was carried into the tent, Mr Dong said: 'If any of these children had a chance of survival, it is gone now.'

The official Xinhua news agency reported yesterday that at least 60 bodies had been recovered from Juyuan. It was not clear if any children had been found alive.

The overwhelming grief at Sichuan's schools reflected not only the number of casualties and personal tragedy of so many families. It also came from the unspoken realisation that the community's hopes for a better future had been crushed in a single afternoon when so many of their brightest and youngest were buried at one go.

Given China's one-child policy, many couples had lost their only child.

At Tuqiao Secondary, 14-year-old Wei Jiamin escaped the earthquake unscathed. 'My two cousins were going to graduate soon,' said the teenager. 'This was supposed to be a month for celebrations.'

chinhon@sph.com.sg