Imagine half of England, from Lands End to Leicester, wiped out and every resident of Britain's five largest cities homeless, injured or dead. Imagine one in four of the country's schools destroyed – with the children still inside.

This is the extent of the disaster in southwest China. The numbers and figures are so vast as to be almost incomprehensible.

When the 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck last Monday, it turned an area of 65,000 square kilometres, exactly half the size of England, on its head.

It sent the heavy walls of homes, hospitals, shops, workplaces and around 7,000 schools in Sichuan province crashing down on those inside. If the same scale of destruction had happened in Britain, almost one quarter of the country's school buildings would have collapsed.

Ten million people - the equivalent of every single person living in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Leeds - were directly affected, and half of them were left homeless. Around 70,000 people - the entire population of Guildford - have died.

In the aftermath, a legion of rescue workers numbering thousands more than the British Army and an air force more than twice the size of the RAF rushed in to pick up the pieces. But it was not until eight days after the quake that the rescuers were finally able to make their way along the battered roads of Sichuan province to all of the 3,669 affected villages.

The journey to one mountain village of 87 residents, Maliuping, saw 37 landslides over the course of a 32-kilometre trek. The village lay 1,200 metres above sea level, just 144 metres lower than the summit of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain.

More than 37,000 medical staff, a number roughly equal to every family doctor in the UK, are working round the clock to treat the 250,000 injured.

Material and monetary aid has poured in. Donations from China and abroad have topped 10.834 billion yuan, or £795 million. That amounts to the Gross Domestic Product of Sierra Leone.

In the past week, more than 1.78 million items of clothing and 784,000 blankets have been distributed along with almost 274 million tonnes of cooking oil, petrol and diesel – enough oil to keep the whole of the UK going for almost half a year. Factories across the country are working triple shifts to produce an extra three million tents for the homeless.

But the task at hand is just as daunting as the numbers.

The more than 41,000 confirmed dead must be buried, many in mass graves dug into the hillsides and often still unidentified. The more than 30,000 people still missing must be retrieved from the depths of the debris amid a stench so putrid that even the sniffer dogs are struggling. And along with homes, roads and schools, millions of lives must be rebuilt.

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