Urumqi (China):  China's May earthquake took nearly 70,000 lives. Today, in a certain sense, it gave one back.

Zhang Xiaoyan, who had been trapped under the rubble for 50 hours while eight-months pregnant, delivered a healthy baby girl today, in a tender coda to the massive tragedy. All through the ordeal, Zhang said, she had hoped only for her daughter to be born.

"Even if I didn't make it, I just wanted my baby to survive. I was holding out hope during the earthquake that this day would come," Zhang, 35,said today as she reclined in a hospital bed in the Urumqi Maternal Care Hospital in her home region of Xinjiang in China's far west. Her daughter, swaddled in a pink floral blanket, lay beside her.

Zhang named the pink-cheeked, 7-pound, 4-ounce (3.3-kilogram) girl Ai, or love, in honour of the rescue workers and strangers who have showered her with kindness, gifts and VIP treatment in the month since she was pulled out of the debris.

Zhang's rescue in the city of Dujiangyan set off celebrations among soldiers and fire crews who had dug, cut and hammered painstakingly through debris in Zhang's half-collapsed seven-story apartment building, which they feared could come crashing down at any minute. Zhang and her 63-year-old mother, who was also rescued, had been trapped under about 18 feet (six metres) of bricks and cement slabs.

In the final moments, a backhoe was manoeuvred into place and Zhang gently placed inside. An excited, overjoyed rescue gave a thumbs-up and onlookers burst into cheers and applause.

Reporters who had anxiously watched the slow progress for hours high-fived each other and Sun Guoli, fire chief of the provincial capital, Chengdu who was overseeing the operation declare it "a miracle of life, using one s life to save a life."

Source : PTI