Cheering Chinese soldiers pulled a survivor from the wreckage of a fertiliser plant today, 100 hours after the massive Sichuan earthquake.

Lin Deyun is a 50-year-old driver who should not even have been in the Yinfeng Fertiliser Plant when the earthquake struck on Monday afternoon: he had been due just to make a quick delivery. But when the building crumpled under the force of an earthquake that has now killed at least 20,000, he was in the games room.

His incredible rescue, the conclusion of which was witnessed by The Times, began when a team picking through the ruins yesterday heard sounds of life. To their amazement, they were able to speak to the trapped driver.

Lacking the equipment to dig down through the rubble, they called in a specialist team from the People's Liberation Army. They also telephoned his daughter and wife, and asked them to come to the site to keep up his spirits.

His daughter, Lin Yuan, told The Times: "I talked to my father yesterday. I called out: 'Daddy' and he said: 'I want water'. I was crying. He said he could not move at all."

It eventually took the rescue team 22 hours to free him. His body was pinned down by such heavy concrete that doctors had to amputate a part of one of his arms and one of his legs.

A military medic, Zhao Hongxiu, said: "We discussed with him that we would have to operate. He agreed that the most important thing was to save his life."

He added: "He does not seem to have internal injuries and he is very strong-willed, so we expect him to live."

His body entirely wrapped in quilts, Mr Lin was laid on a stretcher and he was rushed out of the crumpled building and into a waiting ambulance, which sped off to hospital.

Workers at the plant, situated in the town of Yunhua, said that they feared that more than 200 people are buried in the rubble. Soldiers were seen spraying disinfectant over the debris to cover the stench of rotting bodies.

The factory lies in the valley about 100 miles north of the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu. Scarcely a single building in Yunhua is still standing.

One worker said: "It is very bad here, but higher up the valley it is even worse. There is a school, and we do not think anyone has survived."

No sooner had the ambulance left, then rescue teams turned their attention to the other side of the building, where they believed three men could still be alive in another part of the games room. They had been playing Mahjong (solitaire) when the earthquake struck.

A chemical digger was being used to scoop a path towards the men who were trapped behind a huge concrete slab.

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