Pictures: earthquake wedding

Perhaps, for a startled second, they thought it was their love moving the Earth.

Moments before the church crumbled behind them, spitting out jagged chunks of rock as it went down, the young couple had been posing in its cloisters.

It was their wedding photograph day — a momentous occasion in China, which is considered to be more important than the wedding itself.

But there was a far stronger force than love at work in Sichuan province on Monday last week, when a 7.9 magnitude earthquake ripped through the region, leaving thousands of people dead and injured, and millions homeless and bereaved.

Among the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed by the tremor was Annunciation Seminary, a 100-year-old church in Pengzhou county, 45km (28 miles) south of the epicentre of the quake.

Along with the couple in these photographs there were four other parties having their wedding photographs taken. “Huge blocks of stone hurled down from the church,” one of the photographers wrote on a Chinese internet forum.

“The ground started to shake. Our exit routes had already been blocked off, so we covered our heads and flung ourselves towards open space.”

As the air filled with pieces of rock, the photographer continued to take photographs.

“I threw myself on to the ground, but held my camera aloft and continued to photograph the shaking Earth and the trembling mountains. It was not done out of courage; it was done out of desperation, out of the belief that this was the end of the world,” he added.

Miraculously, of the 33 people who were present, not one was injured.

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