Special report: Strong Earthquake Jolts SW China

    By Liao Lei 　

    MOSCOW, May 17 (Xinhua) -- It's enough. The cardboard box, wrapped with a red piece of paper on which the Chinese characters DONATION were printed, was too full to take any envelopes that were piled beside it and contained all sorts of donation money.

    "I've never seen so many kinds of currencies," Wang Yanlong, chairman of the Association of the Chinese Students in Russia, said at a donation party for quake victims in China's southwest, where a magnitude-7.8 earthquake has claimed more than 28,000 lives since it occurred Monday. The number of casualties is still rising.

    What makes Wang excited more is the preliminary sum of money the first batch of 543 Chinese university students and visiting scholars in Moscow donated on Saturday in the Chinese Embassy.

    The accountants, also undergraduate volunteers, said the week-long donation campaign has collected on its first day a total of 265,886 rubles, 3,392 U.S. dollars, 7,160 Renminbi yuan, 170 euros, 1,150 Korean won and 10,000 Vietnamese dong.

    All in all, the small portion of Chinese students in Russia have donated some 15,800 U.S. dollars, in wrinkled notes or handfuls of coins, while their monthly cost of living normally ranges from 300 to 400 U.S. dollars.

    "Frankly speaking, some of my donations came from the fund my families provides me for my studies, but I do hope that it will offer some help to people in the quake-hit area and my family supports me on that," said Xia Yu, an undergraduate in her 20s majored in pharmacy.