I then realized it would be selfish of me to keep asking children about the earthquake that claimed the lives of their parents. So instead we chatted about trivial things, such as who had the better spectacles: Wu insisted he did.

Early in the day I had spoken to He Liqin, the mother of a 12-year-old boy from Lijiang who carried the torch for the first leg of the relay in the city. Tears welled in her eyes, as the 35-year-old woman from the Naxi ethnic group, told me her memories of the quake that hit Lijiang in 1996.

"I saw many people buried under rubble, but I was heavily pregnant and couldn't do anything to help," she said.

Twelve years on, the images remain in her mind, she said.

But she said she was luckier than the Sichuan orphans.

"I still have my family."

Zhang Guimei, a middle school teacher and director of the Children's Home in Lijinag, which cares for 50 orphans, said: "No one wants to admit to being an orphan.

"We provide them with not only a home, but also constant care and love," Zhang, who carried the Olympic torch on Monday, during the Kunming leg, said.

"We used to think the torch was so far way and unreachable. But when it was confirmed I was to be a torchbearer, the children were so happy, I can't begin to tell you.

"To them, it was a clear message they had not been forgotten."