Despite the treacherous conditions, the search for survivors went on as families refused to give up hope for their loved ones.
Hundreds of aftershocks and bad weather have hampered the rescue operation, and on Monday the transport ministry reported that more than 200 relief workers had been buried by mudflows in recent days.
Details of the accidents were not immediately available. It was unclear whether any of those buried had been pulled out alive.
There have been numerous rockslides from unstable mountain slopes, and blocked rivers swollen by heavy rain have threatened to burst their banks.
Authorities believe more than 5,000 are still buried under the rubble in Sichuan. Most are feared dead, but some are still being pulled out alive.
There was a burst of elation in ruined Beichuan, when one woman was found alive.
Wang Hongguo, head of the rescue team, said she had found her under a mass of concrete. "We had to pull her out very gradually. She looked quite sturdy, so she might pull through," Wang said.
Rescuers also found a 50-year-old woman alive in the wreckage of a residential building at a coal mine.
But rescuers mostly had the gruesome job of recovering decomposing bodies. Dozens of bodies were pulled from the rubble in Beichuan on Monday, and rescuers scattered lime and splashed disinfectant to prevent disease.
Farmer Wang Hongchen and his wife Chen Guangfen scrambled over hundreds of metres of rubble to look for their son, who worked as a mobile phone repair man in the town.
"I think there's still hope. He worked on the first floor, so if he was lucky there would have been space for him to survive," Wang said, in between shouting out his son's name over the ruins.
"There's nothing I want more than to find him alive," added Chen. "Other people who know their relatives have died can call this a memorial day, or a funeral, but not me yet."
Some 245,000 people were injured in the disaster, the worst to hit China since 1976, but rescuers had yet to reach all the stricken villages, Xinhua reported.
On Monday, the Foreign Ministry appealed to the international community to provide more tents for about 4.8 million people who lost their homes in the quake.
So far, 10.8 billion yuan ($1.55 billion) has been received from donors at home and abroad, China said. Rescue teams from Russia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States and Singapore are also searching for survivors.
($1=6.990 Yuan)
