HANGZHOU, June 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese are mourning the death of a bus driver who maintained control of his vehicle, which was carrying 24 passengers, after a piece of heavy sheet steel struck him after passing through the bus' windscreen last Tuesday.

People swarmed to mourn and pay their respects to Wu Bin, the 48-year-old bus driver, at a mourning hall erected at his home. "He saved 24 lives and left no regrets," said Wang Lizhen, Wu's wife of 18 years, to the mourners while holding her husband's portrait. "It was forever our dream to take a trip to Yunnan for our wedding anniversary, but now we can only fulfill our dream someday in heaven," said Wang.

Wu died on Friday due to injuries sustained from the accident, when he was driving on the highway from Wuxi to Hangzhou in east China. A surveillance video shows that after Wu was struck and while in immense pain, he managed to pull over, brake, turn on the flash lamp and ask the passengers not to wander on the highway.

"I use to be a solider on the battle field. From the video, Wu Bin was enduring a piercing and strong pain which was like he'd be hit by a bomb blast," said 78-year-old Zhang Mingkang, a citizen in Hangzhou. The old man brought his calligraphy work which read "A folk hero, a moral model."

Numerous wreathes with elegiac couplets stretched for dozens of meters nearby Wu's home in Hangzhou. "If it was not you, we 24 were doomed to suffer a disaster. But we lost the chance to pay our gratitude to him," said Zhu Laiqun, who was one of the 24 bus passengers.

To Zhu and other passengers, it seemed nearly impossible for Wu to control the bus after he was struck by such a heavy piece of steel. China's Ministry of Transport named Wu "a model dedicated driver" on Monday. Before that, he was was awarded posthumously by his hometown Hangzhou as a "moral model." As a native of Hangzhou, Wu's father was once an army man and his mother a bank clerk. In fact, it was a surprising deed for Wu as a good driver who had no accident and received no passengers' complaints in 10 years with 1 million kilometers driving experience.

"It is the best proof for Wu as good driver as well as a warm hearted man. He was always ready to offer a hand whenever we needed someone to fill in for a change shifts," said Chen Bo, a colleague of Wu. "Wu's act tells us that there are really heros who care only for others in the life-or-death moment," said Zhang Quanming, a Shanghai citizen who drove three hours to Hangzhou. "We should let our kids know this spirit," said Zhang in tears with his family of seven he'd taken to pay homage to Wu.