The Luoyang fire is the deadliest in China for six years.

In the past decade, well over 1,000 people have been killed by big fires across the country.

BBC Beijing correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes says that building safety standards in China are seldom properly enforced.

Chinese cities have been transformed by a recent construction boom, and cheap and rapid construction and alteration takes priority over public safety.

Here are some of the worst fire-related disasters of the past several years:

• November 1993
  87 workers die and 57 are injured in a fire that rips through a toy factory in Shenzhen city, across the border from Hong Kong.

• 27 November 1994
  234 people die in a blaze in a nightclub in Fuxin city in northeastern Liaoning province.

• 8 December 1994
  324 people, 288 of them school children, die in a fire in a cinema in the oil city of Karamay in northweastern Xinjiang region.

• 14 March 1995
  About 30 people die in a blaze in a hotel at the top of a commercial building in Anshan in northeastern Liaoning.

• 24 April 1995
  51 die in a fire at an illegal all-night karaoke and video centre in Urumqi, capital of northwestern Xinjiang region.

• 27 November 1996
  36 people killed after two retarded men set fire to a residential building in downtown Shanghai.

• 13 February 1997
  As many as 39 passengers are killed as the bus they are travelling in catches fire on an expressway in southern Guangdong province.

• 21 September 1997
  32 people die in blaze at shoe factory in Jinjiang city in southeastern Fujian province, after a dissatisfied worker sets fire to the facility.

• 26 December 1999
  20 people die in a hotel fire in Changchun in northeastern Jilin province.

• 29 March 2000
  At least 74 people die in a fire that destroys a pornographic cinema in the city of Jiaozuo in central China's Henan province.

• 22 April 2000
  A fire at a chicken processing plant in Qingzhou in eastern Shandong province kills at least 38 workers.

• 30 June 2000
  At least 36 die in fireworks factory blaze in Guangdong province

What is believed to be China's deadliest fire took place on 18 February, 1977, when 694 were killed in a cinema blaze in Xinjiang.