Seven teams had been dispatched to the worst-hit areas to bring food, water and tents to the hundreds of thousands of people caught up in Saturday's quake, said Cao Junliang, an aid spokesman from the tourist city of Jiujiang.

The official Xinhua news agency said Sunday that 13 people had died and more than 450 were injured in the 5.7-magnitude quake, believed to be the strongest to strike the region in half a century.

Initially 14 people were thought to have died and some newspapers were saying Sunday that the toll was as high as 16.

Most of the dead were in and around the cities of Jiujiang and Ruichang in Jiangxi province, although there was at least one fatality in Wuxue, a city in neighboring Hubei.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao sent a message of support to local authorities, urging them to ensure that people had food and shelter, according to Xinhua.

In both Jiujiang and Ruichang, thousands of people crowded city streets on Sunday, preparing to spend another night outside due to fears of aftershocks.

In and around Ruichang, a total of 420,000 people initially left their homes, apparently fearing the morning's earthquake might not be the last, according to the Xinhua website.

On Sunday, many people remained in the streets, although shops and restaurants were open. Some played cards and mah jongg, enjoying the sunny weather, with temperatures at about 17 degrees Celsius (62 degrees Fahrenheit).

Officials handed out tents to those in need. Police and army personnel were seen in the streets.

Ruichang's main hospital moved dozens of patients into a makeshift tent city outside the facility, separated into two sections -- one for those injured in the earthquake and another for the regular patients.

In and around the city, most houses had suffered severe structural damage, with huge cracks in the walls, roofs torn apart and verandahs collapsed, according to an AFP photographer at the scene.

Officials said Saturday that thousands of homes had been flattened in the quake.

Huge sinkholes measuring about 20 meters (yards) across and five meters deep pocked fields in rural areas.

The quake, which could be felt in cities hundreds of kilometres (miles) apart, hit Saturday at 8:49 am (0049 GMT), causing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.

"We'd just finished our breakfast, when we heard a huge roar, like someone setting off really loud firecrackers," said a civil affairs official in Ruichang.

"Then the houses started shaking, and we just jumped outside," the official, surnamed Liu, told AFP.

Gao Jianguo, a leading earthquake expert, was quoted by sina.com as saying the affected area was not known as an active seismic area.

"The biggest earthquake in recent years in Jiangxi struck in 1987, measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale," he was quoted as saying. "This is the biggest earthquake since 1949" to hit the region.

The US Geological Survey said the quake occurred about 10 kilometers below the surface of the earth.

That makes it a so-called "shallow" earthquake, similar to the devastating quake that struck in Kashmir in early October, a category of tremor generally known to cause greater damage than deeper ones.

Jiujiang is home to half a million people and a traditional scenic spot that was praised by Tang dynasty poets more than a millennium ago.

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