In the grey stillness of early Monday morning, the earth roared. A massive 7.7-magnitude earthquake ruptured beneath the borderlands of China and Myanmar, jolting millions from sleep and plunging whole towns into chaos. The quake struck at a shallow depth, making the trembling all the more violent at the surface, and its epicentre lay in the rugged mountains between China’s Yunnan province and Myanmar’s northern Shan State.
