Beijing - Chinese troops and rescue services were still working to reach 77 villages hit by last week's earthquake in the south-western province of Sichuan, the government said on Monday, as several more survivors were rescued from collapsed buildings.

Troops and paramilitary police had reached 3,592 villages in Sichuan and neighbouring regions by Sunday evening but 77 were still out of because of transportation and telecommunication problems", said Liu Qibao, the provincial head of the ruling Communist Party.

"We must go all out to get into these villages as soon as possible as the villagers there are in desperate need of our help," the official Xinuha news agency quoted Liu as saying.

The death toll in Sichuan from last Monday's 8.0-magnitude earthquake had risen to 32,173, with 9,509 people still buried in rubble, 29,418 missing and 209,914 injured, he said

Several hundred others were killed in neighbouring regions, while the government last week said it expected the final death toll to reach more than 50,000.

About 200 workers also died while trying the repair roads blocked by landslides during the earthquake, the transport ministry said.

The government began three days of national mourning for the earthquake victims on Monday and suspended the Olympic torch relay through China.

Rescue teams found at least two more survivors on Monday morning, and both were sent to hospital in serious condition.

Fifty-year-old Wang Fazhen was pulled from a collapsed residential building at a coal mine near Sichuan's Mianzhu city but she "showed weak life signs and was rushed to hospital," the agency said.

Rescuers in Mianzhu said they had detected possible signs of three more survivors in the area where Wang was found.

Another 61-year-old woman was pulled out of rubble in nearby Beichuan town on Monday. She was suffering from "multiple bone fractures and serious infections, but remained conscious," the agency said.

At least 63 people were rescued on Saturday in several areas of Sichuan.

Some people survived for up to 10 days after the 1976 earthquake in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan, which killed some 240,000 people.

The agency on Sunday quoted Qian Gang, the author of a book on the Tangshan earthquake, as saying one elderly woman had survived for 13 days by drinking her own urine after she was trapped in rubble.

But in reflection of the difficulty facing rescue workers, a team in Sichuan's Yingxiu town was unable to extricate a man and a woman from a collapsed building on Sunday and could only drip glucose and water to them through the rubble. (dpa)