Twenty years ago, Meng Jiahua was on the night-shift working at the coal-face at the Kailuan mines in Tangshan when he felt the earth tremble around him. Terrified, he and his fellows decided to flee to the surface. Emerging into the hot stifling July night, they saw a horrifying sight.
'All the houses and buildings were flattened. Everything you see around was in ruins. The living were lined up along one side of the roads and the corpses on the other. The strange thing is that almost none of the miners working underground were killed. Only those sleeping in their beds at home died,' he said.
Mr Meng is now 72 and retired, but for him and all the other survivors of the Tangshan earthquake, the solemn commemorations on July 27 will be a poignant moment. Chairman Jiang Zemin will attend remembrance ceremonies in front of the stark concrete memorial in the rebuilt city.
The death toll in Tangshan, an otherwise undistinguished mining town about 50 kilometres north of Tianjin in Hebei province, was so huge that in terms of lives lost, it ranks among the gravest natural disasters in human history. Its 242,000 victims are only outnumbered by the 300,000 who died in the Calcutta earthquake in 1737 and the 830,000 thought to have perished in Shaanxi province in 1556.
Tangshan registered 8.2 on the Richter scale, among the most severe ever recorded, and registered XI, close to the limit of the Mercalli intensity scale when even iron railways are bent.
To prepare for the ceremonies, Tangshan has erected new railings around excavated and preserved pieces, which clearly show how even concrete water pipes were dislocated.