At a brief news conference, officials in the region said another 130 people had been injured, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Video broadcast by CCTV shows rescuers in orange overalls climbing over piles of debris blocking houses in a heavily damaged village.
State media reported that around 1,000 houses were damaged and 130 people were injured in addition to the casualties.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 7.1 and was relatively shallow, at a depth of about 10 kilometers. China recorded a magnitude of 6.8.
The epicenter was about 75 kilometers northeast of Mount Everest, which straddles the China-Nepal border. The area is seismically active and is where the Indian and Eurasian plates collide and cause uplifts strong enough in the Himalayan mountains to change the height of some of the world’s highest peaks.
Around fifty aftershocks were recorded in the three hours following the initial earthquake. The Mount Everest Scenic Area on the Chinese side was closed after the earthquake.
About 1,500 firefighters and rescue workers were deployed to search for victims, the Ministry of Emergency Management said. Two hundred soldiers took part in the search, CCTV said.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping called for all efforts to save people, minimize losses and relocate those whose homes were damaged. Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing was dispatched to guide the operations.
According to CCTV, there are a handful of communities within a five-kilometer radius of the epicenter, which was 380 kilometers from Tibet’s capital Lhasa and about 23 kilometers from the region’s second-largest city, Xigaze.
The average altitude in the area around the epicenter is around 4,200 meters, the China Earthquake Networks Center wrote in a social media post.
In Nepal, authorities asked officials in the mountainous area near the epicenter to search for possible casualties or damage.
The National Emergency Operations Center in Kathmandu said residents in northeastern Nepal felt the earthquake strongly, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage to residences.
Over the past century, 10 earthquakes of at least magnitude 6 have occurred in the area where Tuesday’s quake struck, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
