Hundreds of revellers die as fire engulfs dance hall

China: Blaze sweeps through packed shopping centre, killing at least 309 partygoers and construction workers trapped behind locked doors

China's most destructive fire in four years claimed 309 lives on Christmas night as it swept through shops and a party in a discotheque in the city of Luoyang in central China.

China's most destructive fire in four years claimed 309 lives on Christmas night as it swept through shops and a party in a discotheque in the city of Luoyang in central China.

At least 200 victims died amid panic and chaos after being trapped in a fourth-floor dance hall of the six-storey Dongdu Commercial Mansion, where they had been attending a Christmas party. The remaining victims were mostly construction workers who had been finishing renovations elsewhere in the building, preparing one of the larger shops for a grand opening planned for tomorrow.

The fire seems to have broken out two floors below ground level where more refurbishment was under way before it spread upward to envelop the whole building by 9.45pm. Typically, even for large public Chinese buildings, there was no fire alarm to warn the Christmas revellers in time to save themselves, and all exits were blocked or chained shut for security reasons.

Christmas is not a national holiday in China, but young people - identifying it strongly with Western culture and giving gifts, rather than religion - treat it as an excuse to go out with friends or lovers.

One of the handful of those who escaped, a woman in her twenties named only as Ms Wang, had gone to the party with her husband.

"When the fire broke out, the dance hall erupted into madness," Ms Wang told local media. She was able to escape only because her husband hoisted her up so she could climb out of a window and jump down to an air mattress that rescuers had inflated, she explained. With bloodied hands and a face coated in soot, she refused to let paramedics take her to hospital until her husband was found.

But while 135 men and 174 women died in the blaze, only a handful were able to follow Ms Wang's leap to safety. Dozens of ambulances from all the city's hospitals lined up outside in vain. There were no fire escapes, and doors and windows throughout the building were locked to prevent them being opened from either side to protect merchandise, sources said.

Six patrons at most managed to escape the party with their lives, the local media reported. Another five got out of the building but died later at a hospital from smoke inhalation.

The owner of a shop on the second floor, named as Ms Zhang, survived only because she had left to get some food just before the fire would have prevented her escape. "I noticed that staff at Danisi [the shop undergoing renovations] were running around in a tizzy as I left but I had no idea why," Ms Zhang said. "Then when I returned after buying food the whole place was on fire."

A lack of smoke detectors or working fire alarms is still the norm in China despite periodic government fire-safety campaigns - usually begun in the wake of a major disaster.

Fires often result in alarming death tolls as Chinese entertainment complexes, shopping centres and blocks of flats usually lock all exits except where a guard is present. At night, even in dormitories and tower blocks, all doors will be locked with only the doorman keeping a key. Very few buildings put up within the past few years have been equipped with fire escapes.

A cinema blaze in May killed 74 people when patrons were unable to kick down doors that had been locked to prevent gatecrashers. That disaster, as with the Luoyang fire, occurred in Henan province, China's most populous with some 94 million people.

The government metes out heavy penalties - up to life imprisonment - for those deemed responsible for high-profile tragedies, such as the Henan blaze in May. But serious attention to fire prevention is rare as local officials often collude with proprietors.

In an eerie parallel to Monday night's tragedy, a Christmas party in a hotel bathhouse in the northern city of Changchun a year ago ended in disaster when holiday decorations caught fire. The blaze claimed 20 lives and left 51 with serious injuries. According to a local newspaper, fire-safety officials had only that day concluded an inspection of the Changchun Hawaii Grand Hotel, where the bathhouse was located in the basement.

The most recent blaze in China to have claimed more lives than the latest disaster was in December 1994 when 323 people - 288 of them children - died in a fire in a concert hall in the oil town of Karamay in China's north-western region, Xinjiang. A month before that, 233 died in a fire in a dance hall in the north-eastern province of Liaoning when the emergency exits were chained shut. China's deadliest fire occurred at the lunar new year in February 1977, when 694 perished in a cinema blaze in Yili, Xinjiang.