BEIJING (AP) — A landslide buried 47 people in a remote village in China’s mountainous southwest on Monday, state media said. Hours later, two survivors were rescued in freezing temperatures and falling snow.

The disaster occurred shortly before 6 a.m. in Liangshui village in northeast Yunnan province. By evening, nine bodies had been recovered and about 500 people had been evacuated from the area.

Rescue workers continued to try to find victims buried in about 18 houses, the Zhenxiong county publicity department said. Eight of the bodies were reportedly from the group originally buried by the landslide, but it did not say where the ninth body was found.

The cause of the landslide was not immediately known as survivors and rescuers struggled with snow, icy roads and freezing temperatures that were expected to last for at least the next three days.

Luo Dongmei, 35, was sleeping when the landslide occurred, but she survived and was moved to a school building by local authorities.

“I was sleeping, but my brother knocked on the door and woke me up. They said there was a landslide and the bed was shaking, so they rushed upstairs and woke us up,” Luo said.

Luo, her husband and three children, as well as many other residents, had been fed at the school but were still waiting for blankets and other shelter from the cold, she said.

Luo said she was unable to contact her sister and aunt, who lived closer to the site of the landslide. “The only thing I can do is wait,” she said.

State broadcaster CCTV put the death toll at nine as of 6 p.m., some 12 hours after the disaster. Zhengxiong County is located about 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) southwest of Beijing, with an elevation of up to 2,400 meters (7,900 feet).

In many parts of China, heavy snowfall has caused traffic chaos and put lives at risk.

Last week, rescuers evacuated tourists from a remote ski resort in northwest China where dozens of avalanches triggered by heavy snow had trapped more than 1,000 people for a week. The avalanches blocked roads and stranded both tourists and residents of a village in Altai Prefecture in the Xinjiang region, near China’s borders with Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Landslides, often caused by rain or unsafe construction, are not uncommon in China. At least 70 people died in landslides last year, including more than 50 in an open-pit mine in China’s Inner Mongolia region.

In total, natural disasters in China last year left 691 people dead and missing and caused direct economic losses of about 345 billion yuan ($48 billion, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction Commission and the Ministry of Emergency Management). Meanwhile, the Ministry of Natural Resources took emergency measures in case of geological disasters and dispatched a team of experts to the site.

Emergency Management Minister Wang Xiangxi traveled to the landslide site to lead rescue operations, according to a statement from the ministry.

The landslide in Yunnan also came just over a month after China’s strongest earthquake in years shook the northwest in a remote region between Gansu and Qinghai province. At least 149 people died in the magnitude 6.2 earthquake that shook homes and triggered massive mudslides that flooded two villages in Qinghai province on December 18.

Almost 1,000 people were injured and more than 14,000 houses were destroyed in the worst earthquake in China in nine years.