A 34-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was rescued after spending 50 hours trapped in her home in Dujiangyan City, in the province of Sichuan, following Monday's devastating earthquake that hit central and southwestern China.

AP Television footage showed the woman, covered in dust but apparently not injured, being removed from the badly damaged apartment block and taken to an ambulance while onlookers cheered.

Video: Death toll rises rapidly

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"It is really a miracle that we rescued her successfully. This is a miracle achieved with the joint efforts of the government, the party, the military and the people. I think we are saving life with lives, and we are protecting life with lives," says Sun Guoli, fire chief of the nearby provincial capital Chengdu, who supervised the rescue.

'Rising death toll'

The official death toll from the magnitude-7.9 quake that hit central and southwestern China on Monday afternoon rose to nearly 15,000 on Wednesday, and tens of thousands more were still buried or missing.

As help began to arrive in some of the hardest to reach areas, some victims who had been trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centres were springing up over a disaster area the size of Belgium.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted government officials as saying rescuers who hiked on Wednesday into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county - the epicentre of the quake - found it "much worse than expected."

Of the town's population of about 10,000, only 2,300 survived, and 1,000 of them were badly hurt.

The official death toll rose Wednesday to 14,866, Xinhua said, but it was not immediately clear if that number included the 7,700 reported dead in Yingxiu.

In Sichuan province alone, another 25,788 people were buried and 14,051 missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun says, according to Xinhua.