The fire broke out around 5pm on Sunday (Nov 8) in a 40-storey building on a busy downtown main road in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province.

Video images circulated online and verified by Reuters showed smoke billowing over the tower as firefighters poised on cranes outside fought flames that spread upward from a lower annex.

The blaze appears to have started around the fourth floor of the annex before reaching the eighth and ninth floors, which house a hotel, according to state broadcaster reporting cited in the source articles.

Firefighters brought the blaze under control after roughly two hours, and authorities said rescue operations were completed by 8:30pm on Sunday night. In total, 38 people were taken to hospital, and state media said 25 remained there on Monday, nine of them with serious injuries.

The entire structure is a mixed-use commercial and residential property containing several hotels, short-term rental apartments, smaller venues and tutoring centres, according to the reports.

That mix — transient guests, students in after-school classes and permanent residents sharing a single tower — is precisely why the casualty count rose so quickly and why the death toll drew attention.

The building sits on one of Taiyuan's busiest downtown main roads, placing emergency services in dense urban surroundings as the fire spread.

Authorities are investigating the cause of the fire in what the reports describe as a northern manufacturing hub, and no official determination has yet been announced.

The fire is the latest in a series of deadly blazes in China cited in the coverage, including a textile factory fire in the southern city of Foshan that killed eight and a cargo vessel fire at an east China shipyard that killed 25.

The Taiyuan death toll, hospital figures and timeline are drawn from state media reporting relayed by Xinhua and officials and published by CNA and Reuters.