Shanghai New Year's Eve stampede leaves 35 dead, 42 injured, local authorities say.

Thirty-five people have been killed in a New Year’s Eve stampede in Shanghai, Chinese state media is reporting.

Forty-two others were reportedly injured and a government statement said they were being treated in three local hospitals including Shanghai General Hospital.

Government leaders called for “every effort” to care for the injured and said the cause of the accident was under investigation, local authorities said in a statement.

The stampede happened during New Year’s celebrations on the Bund, a waterfront area in central Shanghai, official Chinese government television station CCTV America reported on its website.

It quoted online news site Sina News as saying that masses of crowds in Chen Yi Square on the Bund led to the stampede.

The official Xinhua news service reported the stampede began at 11:35pm (local time). It was not immediately clear what triggered the stampede, the news reports said.

Photos posted on social media showed people receiving first aid on the road and large numbers of police cordoning off the area.

In some photographs, rescue workers were seen trying to resuscitate victims lying on the pavement while ambulances waited nearby.

A photo on the website of the Shanghai Daily newspaper showed what appeared to be dead and injured people lying on the ground with crowds still in the background.

Another photo on social media appeared to show people being crushed to death as a crowd pressed against a barrier.

Images from earlier in the night showed densely packed crowds of revellers along the Bund, a famed tourist areas that runs along the bank of the Huangpu River.

The area is the former financial district of China’s commercial hub and now a popular tourist destination, packed with high-end restaurants and expensive boutiques.

The site for last night’s celebrations, including the countdown to midnight, was moved to a new location specifically out of concerns about over-crowding, after nearly 300,000 people turned out last year, the Shanghai Daily newspaper said on its website.

Most large gatherings in China are carefully controlled by authorities but the country has seen other incidents in which overcrowding has caused panic and deaths.

Last year, 14 people – some of them children – were killed and 10 injured in a stampede that broke out as food was being distributed at a mosque in China’s Ningxia region.

Also last year, six students were killed in a stampede at a primary school in Kunming city in the south-west after the accidental blocking of a stairway corridor.

This article originally appeared on ABC News and is republished here with permission.