Soldiers run to the rescue after the magnitude 7.8 quake hit Tangshan, Hebei province, on July 28, 1976. [Photo by Wang Wenlan/China Daily]

Haunting memory

Most of these images, including Lu's rescue, were first published in 1986, a decade of the earthquake, when Tangshan was commemorating the disaster with a photo exhibition. Wang returned to Tangshan and met Lu.

The last time Wang went to Tangshan was five years ago. The recovery is evident.

"The city is as modern as I can reasonably expect," he said.

However, the photographer has not doubt that the memory of the earthquake still haunts.

"Daybreak came a few hours after my arrival in Tangshan in July 1976. As the faint sunlight revealed the full scale of the disaster, the only thing I could think about was an atomic bomb," he said.

"The next few days saw sweeping wind and rain every night. It was as if nature intended to obliterate from the surface of earth any trace of the tragedy. But like the seeping rainwater, sadness just sank into people's hearts, deeper and deeper."

Wang joined China Daily in 1980 and has continued to shoot pictures for the paper.

"I first picked up a camera at 14. For the next seven or eight years, I took a lot of pictures of myself.

"But Tangshan changed everything. It was the first time I turned my lens toward people in pain, and toward history unraveling," he said. "That was really the end of a self-infatuated young man and the beginning of a serious photojournalist."