The nearest city to the earthquake’s epicenter was Shigatse, the second-largest city in Tibet, with a population of 640,000. Shigatse is regarded as a holy site as the seat of the Panchen Lama, one of the most senior figures in Tibetan Buddhism.
A tourist not far from Shigatse who spoke to The Times said she was in her hotel room when the earthquake started shaking her building. She said the electricity went out and that she and a friend squatted between the beds. When the shaking stopped, they ran out of the building.
The tourist, who only gave her surname, Xu, shared a video showing several single-story brick buildings with collapsed walls.
The Himalayan region is prone to powerful earthquakes. In 2015, a quake in Nepal with a magnitude of 7.8 killed nearly 9,000 people. In Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, residents streamed out of their homes in the morning as the earthquake rattled buildings.
“Based on the magnitude of the earthquake, there could be some damages in mountains of eastern Nepal,” said Lok Bijaya Adhikari, a senior seismologist at Nepal’s National Earthquake Monitoring and Research Center.
