On the approach to Lushan, some residents stood with cardboard signs asking for water.
Some villages close to the epicentre in Lushan and Baoxing counties were left in ruins.
That changed beginning with the town of Tianquan, just southwest of Lushan and typically about a half-hour drive away.
Roads closer to Lushan were clear, apparently to make room for emergency vehicles.
"Look at the condition of my house, " said Lin Feng, a 45-year-old Lushan resident, pointing to her heavily damaged home.
In Lushan, the local middle school appeared to be little damaged and rescue workers were using it as a makeshift hospital.
The official Xinhua News Agency said the well-known Bifengxia panda preserve, which is near Lushan, was not affected by the quake.
Even in the more accessible areas of neighbouring Lushan county, the aid effort has been hampered by road congestion, our correspondent adds.
Villages close to the epicentre in Lushan county were left in ruins.
Global Times says continual aftershocks, severe road congestion and insufficient relief supplies are also hampering the rescue efforts in Lushan and neighbouring counties.
Lushan, where the quake struck, is home to 1.5 million people where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau.
Social media users who said they were in Lushan county posted photos of collapsed buildings and reported that water and electricity had been cut off.
Power and water supplies have been knocked out in Lushan county.
Lushan, where the quake struck, lies where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau and sits atop the Longmenshan fault.
Houses collapsed and roads buckled when the quake hit, with much of the intensity concentrated in Lushan, a county just southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu.
Clashes broke out between police and hungry villagers frustrated at only receiving bottles of water and no food in Chaoyang in Lushan county, Oriental Daily News reports.
Xinhua news agency also praises the massive relief effort, but notes how some survivors in Lushan have held up cardboard signs complaining about a lack of relief supplies.
"I dare not go anywhere near a mountainside, " a woman named Zhu was quoted by Agence-France Presse news agency, in the village of Baoxing, centre of Lushan county, as saying.
As a proportion of the population, more people were killed during the An Lushan rebellion in eighth-century China, for example, or by the Thirty Years War in 17th-century central Europe.
The official, Lushan county's Communist Party chief Fan Jiyue, may have been trying to avoid scrutiny suffered by other officials in the past year after they were spotted wearing pricey wristwatches.
In the town of Lushan, seat of the county government, the damage was less widespread, and streets were filled with excavators and vehicles carrying paramilitary police to help with the rescue efforts.
The quake measured by China's seismological bureau at magnitude-7 and the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m. toppling buildings, many of them older brick structures.
In Lushan, Ma Yiqiang, a local Communist Party publicity official, said the standard of design for public buildings had risen since the 2008 quake, leading to cracks and light damage but leaving them standing.
The roads in the city of Yingjing, on the way to Lushan from Chengdu, were packed with heavy equipment brought in by military and rescue workers, but police were restricting much of the travel.
Xiong Gang, a government worker in Lushan county, said that when the quake struck he was sleeping in his sixth-floor apartment with his wife and child, and he immediately hid them in the bathroom.
The quake caused houses to collapse along a street in Ya'an and sent rocks tumbling into vehicles, Xinhua said, adding that patients were being treated on the ground in front of the Lushan County Hospital.
"The public can of course continue to express scepticism, but we cannot because give up helping compatriots in earthquake-stricken areas of Lushan because of distrust of an organisation, " Beijing Youth Daily commentator Shu Shengxiang adds.
Some mainland internet users are even suspicious over the official death toll of less than 200 people from the earthquake after a hospital in Lushan county reportedly recorded more than 300 deaths, Oriental Daily News notes.
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