A fire in an apartment building in northern China has killed at least 14 people, state media said on Monday, raising the death toll from the previous night, the Daily Mirror reported.
The blaze broke out in a building in Taiyuan city, in Shanxi province, at around 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, the official Xinhua news agency said that evening.
How the toll changed overnight
The two figures in this story come from different moments and should not be read as competing accounts.
- Sunday evening. Xinhua reported that “a total of 38 people were sent to hospitals for treatment, among whom five have died.”
- Monday morning. Xinhua raised the death toll to 14.
The flames were extinguished on Sunday and search and rescue efforts were completed, the agency said. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Not reported
The filing does not say whether the nine additional deaths recorded by Monday were among the 38 people taken to hospital on Sunday, or whether they were found during the search of the building. That distinction matters for understanding the scale of the incident, and this desk cannot resolve it from the available report.
Nor does the report give the number of floors or residents in the building, say how many of the 38 hospitalised remain in treatment, identify any victims, or report any official response beyond the investigation.
A note on sourcing
This report rests on a single verified source. The Daily Mirror carries the story on its international page, credited to MacauBusiness.com and reporting Xinhua, China’s state news agency.
This desk searched the verified international newsrooms it can reach — Al Jazeera and CNN — and found no coverage of this fire at the time of writing. The results those searches returned were older incidents with closely similar details: a 2024 apartment fire in Nanjing that killed 15, the November 2025 Hong Kong tower-block fire, and a 2016 explosion at a residential complex in Shaanxi province — a different province with a near-identical name — which also killed 14. None of them is this event.
Readers should treat the figures above as Xinhua’s, reported at two points roughly twelve hours apart, and subject to revision as the investigation proceeds.
