Tibet landslide buries 83 miners

No survivors have yet been found 28 hours after at least 83 mine workers were buried in a huge landslide at a gold mining site in a mountainous area of Tibet, Chinese state media have said.

The state-run China Central Television (CCTV) said on Saturday that more than 2,000 rescuers dispatched to Maizhokunggar county in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, have been searching for the buried.

"Rescuers have not yet found survivors or bodies," authorities were quoted by the official Xinhua news agency as saying.

The more than 2,000 police, firefighters, soldiers and medics deployed to the site, about 70km east of Lhasa conducted searches armed with devices to detect signs of life and accompanied by sniffer dogs, reports said.

About 30 excavators were also digging away at the site late on Friday as temperatures fell to just below freezing.

A 3km-long section of land, with a volume of about two million cubic meters of mud, rock and debris swept through the area as the workers were resting and covered an area measuring around four square kilometers, CCTV said.

The miners work for a subsidiary of the China National Gold Group Corp, a state-owned enterprise and the country's largest gold producer.

The reports said at least two of the buried workers were Tibetan, while most were believed to be ethnic Han Chinese.

The rescue would be very difficult due to the size of the affected area, Xinhua cited a fire department official as saying.

The reports said the landslide was caused by a "natural disaster" but did not provide specifics.

China's new president, Xi Jinping, who wrapped up a visit to the Republic of Congo in Africa, and Li Keqiang, the new premier, have ordered "top efforts" to rescue the victims, Xinhua said.

Doctors at the local county hospital said they had been told to prepare to receive survivors but none had arrived.

"We were ordered to make all efforts to receive the injured," said a doctor who gave only her surname, Ge, in the hospital's emergency section.

On Saturday morning, a hospital staff member who gave her surname of Wu said it had received no one from the landslide, dead or alive.

The Lhasa city government and China National Gold Group Corporation did not immediately answer calls late on Friday.

The landslide struck at about 6am local time, but Xinhua's first news reports about it ran more than 15 hours later.

Mountainous regions of Tibet are prone to landslides, which can be exacerbated by heavy mining activity.

Han Chinese have been increasingly moving into historically Tibetan areas, and many Tibetans in China say their culture is being eroded.

China rejects criticism of its rule, pointing to huge ongoing investment it says has brought modernisation and better standards of living to Tibet.

In recent years China has discovered huge mineral resources in Tibet, including tens of millions of tonnes of copper, lead and zinc, and billions of tonnes of iron ore, according to state media reports.

The reserves are estimated to be worth more than $100bn, Xinhua reported in 2011, citing government statistics.

It quoted a local official saying that the purpose of mining was to "benefit the local people".