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