A fire broke out in a high-rise apartment block in downtown Taiyuan on Sunday afternoon, and by Monday morning 14 people were dead. Five had been confirmed dead on Sunday night. The other nine died in hospital overnight, as the toll climbed through the early hours.
The blaze started at about 4:59 p.m. local time on Sunday, 8 November, in the Hao Sheng International Apartment, a residential tower in the Liuxiang subdistrict of Yingze district — the commercial heart of Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province in northern China. The building, constructed in 2007, is a mixed-use tower: flats, a hotel and children’s education centres share the same block, according to the South China Morning Post.
Firefighters had the flames out within about two hours, and search and rescue operations concluded by 8:30 p.m. on Sunday. In total, 38 people were taken to hospital. By Monday afternoon, 25 of them were still in hospital, nine in a serious condition, state media reported, citing local authorities.
Witnesses quoted in Taiwanese television coverage described black smoke filling the building within moments of the fire starting, and said the hotel’s smoke alarms did not sound. One tourist who survived told reporters he covered his mouth and nose with a wet towel and guided six other people — a cleaner and a couple among them — through a screen window onto an outer platform, where they waited about 40 minutes before being rescued. Those accounts have not been confirmed by the authorities, and the official investigation has not yet established what started the fire or how it spread.
The district government said efforts were under way to treat the injured and that follow-up work for the victims and their families had begun. The cause remains under investigation, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Monday.
Disaster tolls often climb in the hours after the event — in Egypt on Sunday, a train crash toll rose from four dead to seven overnight as the injured were counted. In Taiyuan, the same pattern played out: the first confirmed deaths were only five, and the figure nearly tripled before morning. With nine people still seriously injured, officials have not ruled out the toll rising further.
It is the latest deadly fire in a Chinese residential tower, and it raises the same questions that follow every one of them: how a fire moves through a building where families, hotel guests and schoolchildren are all under one roof, whether alarms and escape routes worked as they should, and how quickly help reached the people trapped inside. The answers will come from the investigation now under way — and from the survivors, who are already telling their own version of what happened on Sunday afternoon.
For now, the numbers are what they are: 14 dead, 25 in hospital, and a building in one of Taiyuan’s busiest quarters sealed off while investigators work through the wreckage. It is the second mass-casualty disaster to reach this site’s front page in two days, after 21 people died when a migrant boat capsized off Senegal — a reminder that the toll of a disaster is rarely settled on the day it happens.
