Shallow quake hits western China

A shallow quake with a magnitude of 5.0 hit the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang today, seismologists said.

A shallow quake with a magnitude of 5.0 hit the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang Monday, seismologists said.

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The quake struck at 3:05 am (local time) at a depth of 15 kilometres with its epicentre 285 kilometres southeast of Altay, a city of 142,000 near the Mongolian border, the US Geological Survey said.

There were no early reports of casualties.

Xinjiang is a vast mountainous region in the north-west of China, covering around a sixth of the country. Around 20 million people live there, eight million of them Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim grouping.