Quake shakes Taiwan, no damage reported

TAIPEI (Reuters) - An earthquake exceeding magnitude 6 hit eastern Taiwan early on Sunday but the island's officials said no damage had been reported so far.

Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau put the magnitude at 6.3 on the Richter scale and the U.S. Geological Survey said the size of the tremor was 6.1, after first gauging it at 6.2.

USGS said the quake, which struck at 1:36 a.m. on Sunday (1736 GMT Saturday) was centered about 22 miles (29 km) south of Hualien, which is located on the east coast of Taiwan. It was strong enough to wake people in the capital Taipei.

"We haven't had reports of any casualties or damage so far," said an official from Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau.

Earthquakes occur frequently in Taiwan, which lies on a seismically active stretch of the Pacific basin. Elsewhere within the past week, several thousand people are feared to have died in two powerful quakes in Indonesia, and tsunamis triggered by undersea quakes killed nearly 200 people in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga.

(Reporting by Lee Chyen Yee and Ralph Jennings in Taipei and Alan Elsner in Washington; editing by Mark Trevelyan)