As I sat at my desk typing diligently away at events for the up-and-coming issue of City Weekend, I suddenly began to feel a strange sense of nausea, but not nausea. I was swaying back and forth in my chair, but not on purpose. The initial hypochondriac paranoia--am I getting sick? going to pass out? have I developed a sudden acute case of avian influenza, or perhaps getting ill after the three kuai cold noodles I just ate for lunch--passed, I realized that everyone else in the office was having a similar unsteady moment. Earthquake! At least that's what our colleagues announced, having just spoken to our other office up in Beijing who'd also felt the earth move, and not thanks to a raucous Sunday evening moment of excitement.

As chatter filled the office, people began to wonder if they should evacuate the building and indeed, many workers began to stream down the stairwells of our ubiquitous World Trade Center building and out into the street. Meanwhile, your fearless CW editors proclaimed, "Nothing's fallen off the walls--that's just a baby." After a short discussion of the communal carsick sensation and laughing at the apparent panic of those who'd never experienced an earthquake in Shanghai, we surmised that if the quake was also felt in Beijing, we must have been experiencing an aftershock. Sure enough, Taiwan felt the rumblings as well as did Bangkok and other areas throughout Southeast Asia. This must be a big one, I thought to myself and wondered if it was Tokyo under the yoke of Mother Nature again after recently experiencing a 6.8 quake on the Richter Scale. After scouting out some international news sites online, the Globe and Mail and The Straits Times simultaneously produced the same report stating that the quake originated in Sichuan Province.

The epicenter of the quake was a site 100km outside of Chengdu in Sichuan Province. The quake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter Scale, sent shock waves throughout China and beyond. The highly Xianshuihe Fault Zone runs through Western Sichuan. My guess is this is where the quake erupted from, though no further reports have confirmed this yet. Here's hoping that those in Chengdu managed to escape harm and that those in Shanghai who were quick to evacuate are making their way back to the office.