"The great Tangshan earthquake was one of the most devastating disasters the world has known, but the heroism of the Tangshan people refused to die," Tangshan Communist Party boss Zhang He said at a memorial service in the city.

"During the earthquake and its aftermath the people of Tangshan grouped together and rescued hundreds of thousands of compatriots from danger."

Zhang, cited by the official Xinhua news agency, further championed an "unflappable spirit of struggle" which was forged by the earthquake and has helped Tangshan rebuild into one of China's top 50 cities.

The earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, destroyed over 90 percent of the buildings in the northern Chinese coal mining city, striking at 3:42 in the morning of July 28, 1976 and shaking the region for 15 seconds.

Nearly one quarter of the city's one million residents died in the quake and the subsequent 7.1 degree aftershock that struck 15 hours after the initial jolt.

In the run-up to the anniversary, China's state-controlled press has focused on the rebuilding of Tangshan into a city of 7.1 million people with a gross domestic product of 203 billion yuan (25 billion dollars) last year.

"The miraculous rise of Tangshan in the past three decades is exhilarating," the China Daily trumpeted in an editorial.

Still for many locals, the sense of mourning in the city has not abated after three decades.

"Things have really changed for the better in Tangshan over the years," Liu Xuemei, 37, a bookseller who lost eight family members during the quake, told AFP in the city last week.

"But still on July 28 we will not be celebrating our survival, we will only commemorate the dead."

Another survivor, Tang Jianwen, 50, still has vivid memories of the destruction immediately after the quake hit.

"So many people died, people were digging out the dead and lining them up on the sides of the roads. After several days the stench was unbearable, but for most everyone there was no where else to go," Tang told AFP.

Thirty years on, controversy remains over the Chinese government refusing all international aid to cope with the disaster and appearing to cover up the extent of the devastation.

It only announced the official death toll of 242,000 in 1979 with the secrecy leading to widespread speculation that the actual death toll could be up to three times higher.

The US Geological Survey says on its website 655,000 people may have died in the Tangshan disaster.

Another point of controversy that still lingers is whether or not the government could have done more to prevent the enormous loss of life after receiving warnings from seismologists of an imminent quake in the area.

While central and Tangshan authorities failed to heed the warnings, officials from Qinglong county, about 70 kilometers from Tangshan city, took them seriously.

This resulted in nearly zero fatalities in the county of over 470,000 people despite more than 180,000 buildings being flattened.

In 1996, the United Nations commended Qianlong county as a case study in disaster reduction.

"The Tangshan earthquake had both elements of a human calamity and a natural disaster," said Zhang Qingzhou, a survivor of the disaster and author of the just published book: "The Alarming Record of Tangshan."

"The difference of whether you prepare for an earthquake or not is huge. Qianlong county officials did thorough preparations and only one person died and that was due to a heart attack."

Tangshan officials told AFP last week they expected President Hu Jintao to attend memorial activities in the city. But state press made no mention of Hu visiting Friday.

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