Baqen County quake: 16 dead, injuries rise to 76 and 12,489 evacuated

The confirmed death toll from Thursday night's magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Baqen County has held at 16, but the injury count has climbed sharply since the first accounts, and the scale of China's response now runs to 80 million yuan.

The quake struck at 10:33 p.m. on Thursday, 22 October 2026, in Baqen County, Nagqu City, in China's Xizang (Tibet) Autonomous Region, at a depth of less than 10 kilometres. Shallow earthquakes at that depth transmit more energy to the surface, and this one hit a remote, mountainous area at night, when residents were indoors.

Injury figures reported across sources range from 54 to 76. No source has described the change as a formal revision, so the current official count remains unclear. More than 330 houses collapsed, and 12,489 residents have been evacuated, according to figures carried in the reporting. Train services through the affected areas have been suspended.

China's Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Emergency Management jointly allocated 50 million yuan, about US$7.5 million, in emergency disaster relief funds. The National Development and Reform Commission earmarked a further 30 million yuan from the central budget for recovery. Satellites and drones have been deployed to search for survivors.

The money and hardware matter because of where they are going. Baqen County is remote and mountainous, and hundreds of homes are gone. A relief allocation of this size, paired with aerial search assets and a mass evacuation, indicates disruption well beyond what a death toll of 16 alone would suggest.

Several questions remain open. Those gaps are likely to narrow as assessments continue.