By Chris Buckley

DUJIANGYAN, May 17 (Reuters) - The air around the Dujiangyan crematorium is acrid with smoke and disinfectant as families bid farewell to victims of southwest China's calamitous earthquake, all too many of them children.

One was Yang Li, a stocky 16-year-old boy at Juyuan Middle School on the rural fringe of this city in Sichuan province, where he was crushed to death with perhaps 400 or more students under a six-storey school.

Yang's farming parents have since kept vigil besides a mourning display in front of their quake-damaged home, with incense, a black-and-white picture of their only child, and paper flowers in white, the traditional Chinese colour of grief.

"This has taken away all that we had," Yang's mother, Li Qun, said hoarsely, sitting near the display. "As soon as the earthquake came, I ran as fast as I could to the school. But I was too late. Now I can't sleep or eat or think."

She said he was a mischievous boy starting to get serious about the competitive exam to enter a good high school. Like many of his classmates, he yearned to use education to escape the countryside for a city life of business and wealth.

With so many school buildings in Sichuan crumpling under the blow of the quake on Monday, such scenes of parents mourning their sons or daughters are being repeated.

China put the quake's total death toll at around 22,000 on Friday, but has said the number could well exceed 50,000. Many were children in scores of schools that collapsed, killing, maiming or burying hundreds at a time.

With many villagers and townspeople around here abiding by the government's "one-child" population control policy, that loss cuts all the more deeply, snatching away only children who carried their parents hopes and future security.

"Most parents were farmers and traders but they often had just one child," said Dong Tianjian, whose 15-year-old boy, Dong Yang, died in the quake. He was one of 69 children killed in a class of 70, said his mother.

"Without him, what's there for me? Nothing, nothing at all," she said standing in front of the piles of pulverised concrete that were once her son's classrooms.

SLIPSHOD BUILDINGS

Juyuan Middle School has become a bleak symbol of the deadly mix of natural destructive power and slipshod building that dealt out so much death in the quake.

The mother Dong rushed to the school when a first tremor rattled cups and plates in her nearby home at about 2:38 on Monday afternoon, she recalled.

The building with her son's classroom had not collapsed by the time she reached the school gate, but she watched helpless as it fell, killing some 400 or more of the school's 1,300 students, according to locals and a teacher.

"There would have been many more killed, except so many of the kids were at physical education or computer classes outside their home rooms," said Chen Jianmei, a teacher at the school now busy tending to grieving parents.

The building that Chen was in did not collapse, unlike the one next to it. Chen said that building was an older one the school had taken over from a primary school.

"There was the first shake and nobody moved. I thought for a moment that I was just woozy, and when the earthquake came back strong we all ran, but it was too late for them."

The Jiayuan school was one of the first sites that Premier Wen Jiabao visited after he rushed to oversee relief efforts this week.

Parents and relatives said that after the worst sting of grief numbs, they will press for answers and accountability from officials they said turned a blind eye to shoddy building and corruption that milked investment away from better materials.

"Look at these building materials," said Dong, pointing at the piles of concrete and drawing supportive comments from a crowd of onlookers.

"This is the junk they used for China's next generation. (Editing by Nick Macfie and Sanjeev Miglani)

chris.buckley@reuters.com; +86 13501014479)

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