China has said it will sent four top medical experts to try to save the legs of a two-year-old girl orphaned and seriously wounded in a deadly train crash that sparked widespread public outrage.

The girl, nicknamed Yiyi, was found alive in the wreckage 21 hours after last month's high-speed rail collision -- well after rescue operations had ended -- prompting accusations the search for survivors was halted too early.

Both the girl's parents were killed in the accident and her uncle, Xiang Yuyu, wrote an open letter to the Ministry of Railways on his blog urging the government to send experienced doctors to save her legs.

"Little Yiyi lost her parents in this disaster... and has suffered enormous pains from multiple operations," he wrote in his Sina blog.

"We plead to you to save the flying wings of Yiyi, please!"

The government, which has came under unusually harsh criticism from the media and Internet users in the wake of the accident, said in a statement late Monday it would send four medical experts to the hospital where Yiyi was being treated.

The decision was aimed at "ensuring the best treatment" for patients at the hospital, it said.

At least 40 people were killed and nearly 200 more wounded when two high-speed trains collided near the eastern city of Wenzhou on July 23.

Yiyi has had five operations on her left leg, which doctors had feared they might have to amputate, the official Xinhua news agency said.

It is unlikely medical staff will be able to restore the full function of the leg because some of the muscles have atrophied, the agency quoted her doctor as saying.

The disaster was a major embarrassment to the Chinese government, which had made the construction of the world's biggest high-speed rail network a key political goal.

Last week authorities said they were suspending approval of new railway construction projects and ordered the maximum speed of trains on the newly-built lines lowered by as much as 20 percent amid safety fears.

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