A landslide has crashed down a Tibet mountainside and buried 83 workers in a gold-mining area, according to Chinese state media.
A vast three kilometre long section of land, with a volume of two million cubic metres, slid down a slope and buried the workers' camp in Maizhokunggar county, east of the Tibetan capital Lhasa.
Some 1,000 police, firefighters and doctors were sent to the disaster site, at an altitude of 4,600 metres, the official Xinhua agency said.
There were also 200 vehicles and 15 dogs, and sets of life-detecting equipment.
State broadcaster CCTV quoted a member of the Chinese People's Armed Police on the scene as saying that "the situation looks serious, the collapsed area is three or four square kilometres".
The landslide brought massive rocks which smashed the workers' camp area and sliced a huge excavator in two, Xinhua said.
Rescuers have so far found no signs of the 83 trapped workers. The rescue would be very difficult due to the size of the affected area, a fire department official was quoted as saying.
Diggers have been brought in to help with the search The workers were from a subsidiary of the China National Gold Group Corporation, a state-owned company and the nation's biggest gold miner.
Almost all of them were Han Chinese, the national ethnic majority, with only two of them ethnic Tibetans, Xinhua added. Most were migrant workers from the provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan.
China's new president Xi Jinping, who is currently visiting the Republic of Congo in Africa, and new premier Li Keqiang had ordered "top efforts" to rescue the victims, Xinhua added.
A worker at a hospital in the county reached by AFP news agency late on Friday said it had not yet received any casualties but staff were "making preparations".
Mountainous regions of Tibet are prone to landslides, which can be exacerbated by heavy mining activity.
In recent years China has discovered huge mineral resources in Tibet, including tens of millions of tonnes of copper, lead and zinc, and billions of tonnes of iron ore, according to state media reports.
Around 1,000 police, firefighters and doctors went to the disaster site The reserves are estimated to be worth more than $100bn (£66bn), according to government statistics. It quoted a local official saying that the purpose of mining was to "benefit the local people".
But mining developments can lead to accusations of exploitation.
In 2010, at least four Tibetans may have been killed and 30 others hurt when Chinese police fired on crowds protesting the expansion of mine operations blamed for environmental damage.
The demonstrators, in a Tibetan area of Sichuan province, complained that stepped-up Chinese gold-mining operations had brought large numbers of people and heavy machinery to the area, damaging farmland and the local grassland habitat.
A separate gas explosion at a coal mine in northeast China has left 28 people dead.
China's State Administration of Work Safety said the cause of the blast at a state-owned mine outside Baishan in Jilin province is under investigation.
The Xinhua news agency said that apart from the 28 deaths, 13 people have been rescued.
Chinese mines remain among the deadliest in the world, with frequent explosions of the gases released in mining. A government campaign to close small, illegally operated mines and upgrade equipment in other has markedly improved safety in recent years.
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