Officials expressed gratitude for offers of aid from around the world but said they would not admit foreign aid workers immediately because they could not accommodate them. Officials said the government had allocated more than $120 million for quake aid.
President Bush called President Hu Jintao to express his condolences, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. The U.S. will provide an initial contribution of $500,000 in relief aid, she said.
Premier Wen Jiabao went to Dujiangyan, where a middle school had collapsed and trapped hundreds of students. He also visited other locations.
Part of the main highway to Beichuan, an area north of Chengdu near the epicenter, was closed much of Tuesday.
The alternate road was rutted and muddy in places, with scores of tractors, thrashers and bulldozers slowly making their way to assist in the rescue or for use in the imminent wheat harvest. Flatbed trucks ambled along bearing road-making equipment, an apparent response to the premier's call to open the roads into the battered area by midnight Tuesday.
"Wen visited here this morning," said a man named Zhang in neighboring Shifang, who declined to give his first name because of the sensitivity of speaking to foreigners. "The mayor met him, we didn't. But we were very touched he took the time."
Zhang was sitting with five family members in a tent made of two oversized umbrellas and a tarp beside their collapsed house.
"I don't know how we'll ever afford to rebuild," he said.
The city is filled with patrolling police officers, some of them carrying scratchy microphones they used to tell residents: "Stay calm. Don't panic."
Nearby, police kept a close watch on the Sichuan Feng Industrial Co. factory. It was one of two chemical plants in Shifang that collapsed under the force of the earthquake, burying several hundred people, spilling 80 tons of liquid ammonia and forcing the evacuation of more than 6,000 residents, state news media said.
A man who lives above the plant said he was heading home when he was met by hundreds of panicked workers fleeing the factory.
Several of the giant ammonia tanks were knocked over, he said, killing many of the more than 1,000 workers at the plant, though most were crushed in the rubble.
"People who lived through the chemical disaster said it was unbelievably brutal," he said.
