YINGXIU, CHINA- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon visited the epicentre of China's huge earthquake on Saturday, meeting victims and drawing an unspoken comparison with the sluggish aid efforts after a cyclone in neighbouring Myanmar.

He arrived by helicopter in the flattened remains of Yingxiu, a small town tucked in a steep river gorge which lost an estimated two-thirds of its inhabitants in the May 12 quake and has almost no safe buildings left standing.

Mr Ban was met by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who said the official death toll - currently 60,560 - could climb above 80,000, with nearly 30,000 people still missing.

As relief workers in white coats and facemasks unloaded relief supplies and thousands of troops worked to clear rubble and bury the dead, Ban repeatedly paid tribute to the leadership of Mr Wen and response of his government, and pledged full support.

'The Chinese government, at the early stage of this natural disaster, has invested strenuous effort and demonstrated extraordinary leadership,' he told a small group of journalists.

Beijing has largely won praise for its relief efforts, sending over 100,000 troops and a string of senior leaders to the worst-hit areas and accepting some foreign help even though the quake zone is home to China's chief nuclear weapons research lab.

Easy media access to the worst-hit areas, and blanket domestic coverage, triggered a flood of donations from home and abroad, which hit 26 billion yuan (S$5.09 billion) by Saturday.

Russian army sends humanitarian aid to China: report
Russia's military on Saturday sent eight planeloads of humanitarian aid including tents, blankets and field kitchens to China for earthquake victims, Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency reported.

The cargo planes took off from airports in Siberia and a ninth planeload was to leave Moscow to deliver aid to the airport in Chengdu in the quake-stricken province of Sichuan, the report said, quoting an army official.

The order comes as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visits China on his first foreign trip since taking office earlier this month.

Russia earlier sent dozens of emergency rescue workers and doctors, as well as nearly 60 tonnes of humanitarian aid, to the earthquake zone.

The contrast with neighbouring Myanmar was unspoken but strong. After Ban's visit there earlier this week the government finally agreed to open up to all foreign aid workers, around three weeks after Cyclone Nargis slammed into the country's delta.

In its aftermath the secretive Myanmar government appeared ill-equipped to help an estimated 2.4 million destitute survivors but it barred most foreign aid workers for weeks and pushed on with a long-planned constitutional referendum.

'I'm coming from my visit to Myanmar, where 130,000 people were killed or missing. It was very humbling and very tragic,' Mr Ban said. Media access to the area has been tightly controlled.

He had asked China to arrange a visit to quake-hit areas in part to send a signal about how to handle a natural disaster, said UN diplomats who declined to be named.

Speaking later on his plane back to Bangkok, Mr Ban said there was 'some difference' between the way that the Chinese and Myanmar governments had handled their crises.

Asked if his praise of Chinese leadership was intended as a message to Myanmar's rulers, he said: 'You may have your own interpretation, I just wanted to talk about the facts.'

Promise to rebuild
Mr Wen said in Yingxiu that China is now focused on providing tents for nearly 5 million homeless, preventing epidemics and averting 'secondary disasters' like flooding and landslides.

Soldiers, relief workers and survivors are already pushing on with cleaning ruins and agricultural work, although mountainous terrain means some places are still cut off after highways buckled, bridges collapsed and landslides blocked roads.

Workers plan to dig tunnels to drain water from unstable lakes that built up after landslides blocked rivers in the quake region. The government fears that as water levels rise they could burst, drowning survivors and rescue workers downstream.

Tens of thousands have been evacuated as a precaution.

Armed police, who are experts in hydroelectric missions, have arrived at a lake near Tangjiashan, and construction workers and equipment will be airlifted to the cut-off site, the official Xinhua agency cited a vice minister for water resources saying.

It is just 3.2 kilometres upstream from Beichuan, a town so badly hit that it will be rebuilt in a new location and the ruins of collapsed buildings left as a quake memorial.

The 'tough natural environment' also means 10,000 survivors from the quake-hit county of Qingchuan will have to be resettled in other provinces, Xinhua said, because there is nowhere safe for them to live near their former homes.