If Wu Xingyan had not been more than seven months’ pregnant she might have survived Monday’s earthquake.

She was eating lunch with her parents-in-law when the ground shook. They rushed from the house – but they might have been safer inside. As they ran through the courtyard of their simple single-storey farmhouse, a heavy arched gate buried them under a slab of concrete.

By the time neighbours had been able to pull them out from under the rubble the young woman – one month short of her 22nd birthday – had miscarried. There was no doctor in the village to tend to her. All telephone lines to emergency services were busy or severed.

At last a motor rickshaw was found to take them to hospital. It was too late for Wu Xingyan. Her grieving husband, Wei Yunbo, 27, said: “She had lost too much blood. There was nothing they could do. She would have been a mother soon.”

He found his father in a hospital in the Sichuan provincial capital, Chengdu. He could not track down his mother. He only knows that she, too, was hurt.

In Lihua village almost every house crumbled in the 7.9 magnitude earthquake. But the poor farmers who live there said that only seven people died because the walls of their houses were no more than one brick thick and it was easy to crawl out from the debris.

One young boy said: “We are luckier here than those people in the mountains. At least we are alive.”

The farmers are joining forces to move from their makeshift plastic shelters and have already tied together bamboo staves to make the skeleton of a building that they will cover with plastic sheeting to house three families.

The roof of almost every house collapsed, littering the muddy paths with broken grey tiles that crunch underfoot. Walls tumbled and cracks more than a foot wide split the earth.

Villagers did not dare to enter their homes for fear that a teetering wall or unstable ceiling would crumble and crush them.

Pan Jimin, the village production brigade leader, said: “Even our bowls and chopsticks are still on the tables. We dare not go in to bring them out. There are so many aftershocks that the whole house could fall at any moment.”

Frightened teenagers pushed visitors away from the ruined buildings lest a wall should collapse.

One farmer wept with despair: “I have nothing.” He gestured to the fallen straw sheds in which he grew wood ears – a fungus popular in soups and hotpot.

“Our whole village relies on growing wood ear for our income. It has brought us a good living and we have borrowed to invest more. Now we are buried in debt.”

Wei Yunbo said that he might have to give up his job as a cook in Chengdu to help his father to grow wood ears. First, though, he would mourn his young wife. He carried her ashes home and found a Taoist master to ensure that she would spend eternity in a propitious site.

In all his 50 years, Liao Bingchong has never been so busy. In three days the Taoist master has presided at 12 funerals – all for victims of the earthquake. It fell him to employ his knowledge of feng shui to designate a suitable resting place for her ashes. Master Liao waived his usual fee of 100 yuan (£7.35) for all earthquake victims. As he was reciting verses over the grave his mobile phone rang. “I have to go to another funeral now,” he said.

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