A woman saved a two-year-old girl from certain death after she spotted her falling from the window of a 10th-floor apartment in the eastern city of Hangzhou Saturday.

Wu Juping, 31, reached the falling child in time to break the toddler's fall, preventing the girl from hitting the ground at full force. 

A pictorial diagram shows the mother reaching the falling child. [Beijing Times]

Wu, a mother of a seven-month-old boy, suffered multiple fractures to her left forearm in the impact and she is recovering in hospital.

The two-year-old girl, nicknamed Niu Niu, is in a critical condition having sustained serious internal injuries.

Rescuer Wu Juping smiles at her own son in a ward of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Bone Fracture Hospital at Fuyang, a county-level city in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, on Sunday, July 3, 2011 after she has saved a 2-year-old girl. [Photo: Xinhua]

Niu Niu, who the girl's family said had been left at home alone while her grandmother fetched washing from the top floor of the building, was seen hanging out of an open window at around midday on Saturday. "She clung to the windowpane for about two minutes and then fell to the ground," a neighbor told Xinhua news agency.

Wu was strolling by the building at the time of the fall. Seeing the child about to plummet from the building, she kicked off her high-heeled shoes and ran underneath the child, stretching her arms to the sky in an effort to catch the toddler in mid-fall.Wu said she had heard guards and other people shout that a child was going to fall.

When she looked up she saw a man on a balcony on the floor below trying to get the toddler to climb onto a ladder he was holding. Then the child lost her grip and fell.

The toddler crashed into Wu's arms and both fell to the ground. Wu passed out momentarily. Niu Niu burst into tears.

Both were immediately rushed to hospital.

"I opened up my arms subconsciously while hearing a scream overhead," Wu said later. "Then I felt a strong pain in my left arm. I fell on the ground and lost consciousness."

Doctors ruled out injuries to the toddler's chest and spine but were keeping her under observation.

"It is so lucky that her fall was stopped during that instant," a doctor said.

The story soon spread online, complete with photographs of the scene, describing the incident and Wu's heroic efforts.

Thousands of people were moved by her bravery and prayed for her and the child to recover soon.

"In dynamic terms it would be impossible to catch the child, but in a world with love, everything is possible," was one online comment.

A hospital in the nearby city of Fuyang that specializes in treating fractures has offered to treat Wu for free.

"When she reached out to the child, she put her own life at risk," Jin Dengfeng, the hospital's president, told Xinhua. "She could have died or been paralyzed for the rest of her life if the child had hit her head or back."

Jin said Wu would need six months to recover from her injuries.

Lying in her hospital bed, Wu said: "I don't regret anything that happened. I just hope that Niu Niu will recover."

Her only worry was that, because of the medication she was on, she had to stop breast-feeding her own baby.