In front of the collapsed Xuankou Middle School, in Yingxiu town, a giant sculpture of a clock has cracks for hands. They stop at 2:28, when the earthquake hit. From then on, in the quake zone, there are two eras: before, and after.

On 2:28 in the afternoon on May 12, 2008 I was at my desk at Reuters in Beijing. The room began to sway, as if 80,000 souls departing this world in one howling maelstrom had reached all the way to the capital. A few seconds later, Reuters Shanghai bureau felt it too. Then Bangkok. Reuters immediately sent a time in to Sichuan. I was sent later, arriving Day 6. Earlier this year, I was reading a book to my children that mentioned an earthquake. I started telling them to stand in a doorway or crawl under a desk if an earthquake hits, and the tone of my voice scared them so much they couldn’t sleep. I decided to go back to Sichuan, to see the places I reported from ten years ago.

On Day 6, the most terrifying time was over, almost anyone who would be rescued had been rescued, for the rest there was no hope left. How to feed and house 5 million refugees was now the problem. In Chinese cities, large screens were broadcasting images from the quake, donations were flooding in from Chinese citizens and foreign countries. When I landed at Chengdu airport, it felt like a war mobilization. Planes from every country were lined up wingtip to wingtip along the tarmac, each only a few centimeters apart from the next. In the quake zone, blue rescue tents were being put up everywhere, inside the tents grief was settling in and hunger. Everyday I went somewhere different, in each place nearly every school had collapsed. Many places, it felt like fate was against them. In one town, they had just finished a new dorm but the rest time ended at 2:00 so the kids were back in the old classrooms, which had collapsed. In Qingchuan, I saw the brand new school building was fine. But in that town, the noon rest ran until 3, so the students were still in the dorms. The girls’ dorm was locked so the girls couldn’t escape. They all died too. In Pengzhou, that afternoon, the people had pulled the students out of the middle school, and then watched that night as every single one died of their injuries. “We rescued them all,” a local official told me, “but we couldn’t keep them alive.”