Twelve people have been rescued and five confirmed dead after a cruise ship carrying 458 people capsized in China’s Yangtze River on Monday night, according to Xinhua News Agency.

The Eastern Star, which left the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing at 1:15 p.m. Thursday for Chongqing Municipality on the upper reaches of the river, sank "within one or two minutes" of being caught in freak weather in Jianli, Hubei province, according to the ship's captain and chief engineer who survived the incident.

Authorities released a name list of passengers on Tuesday morning. Most are elderly people.

The list also showed that 19 of those unaccounted passengers are from Fuzhou city and Fuqing county in Fujian province.

The sinking could be the worst in China for decades. The water is 15 meters deep where the four-storey ship sank at around 9:30 p.m. Monday in the Jianli section of the Yangtze, according to the river navigation administration.

Wang Yangsheng, senior official with the Yueyang Maritime Rescue Center, said the incident happened, "so fast that the captain did not even have the time to send out a distress signal." There were 406 passengers, five tour guides and 47 crew onboard the ship. More than 400 people boarded in Nanjing, including over 100 tourists with the state-owned Shanghai Xiehe Travel Agency. Most of those onboard are from Shanghai and neighboring Jiangsu Province.