Hello and welcome to Newsour from the BBC World Service coming live from London. This is Owen Bennett Jones.

Mandalay was once a royal capital complete with a palace and pagodas, monasteries and markets,

a fabled city where craftsmen work with silk and gold leaf,

but it's also a place that's taken a lot of punishment over the years.

Much was destroyed during the Second World War, and now this earthquake.

We'll be going to Mandalay in a moment, but just now get an update from the Burmese capital, Napidore.

A team sent in from Singapore has been working with Myanmar's fire department

to free a man trapped in rubble there for 40 hours.

And one of the Burmese fire department crew described the operation.

I feel so sorry to see the situation. All the pagodas and temples, including stairways in my

village, have collapsed. We've lost everything. I feel so sad to see this kind of sorrowful situation.

Up until now, I've never experienced anything similar to this. Well, the government is now saying 1,700 people have been killed,

and Michael Dunford is with the World Food Programme in Napier,

and a few hours ago he spoke about the latest casualty figures.

Those numbers continue to rise, which just highlights how devastating this earthquake has been

and how desperate the needs are.

It's essential now that we have humanitarian access to meet the people wherever they are,

with the support that is required.

We call on all parties to stop fighting so humanitarian actors can disperse throughout the country and meet the needs of the population most affected.

So says the World Food Programme. Now, we've just managed to get through to a teacher in Mandalay. Communications have been difficult, but we did get through to her calling her by her nickname Nikki. And I asked

first of all, what happened when this earthquake struck? When the earthquake hit, I was

teaching my students. And my students age 4 to 16 and they are around about 60 students in my

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