Typhoon targets eastern China

A powerful typhoon targeted China's booming eastern province of Zhejiang and the nation's financial capital, Shanghai, yesterday, prompting evacuation of over 1.6 million people as ships were recalled to port.

Typhoon Wipha was about 300 kilometres southeast of Wenling city at 8 p.m. With gusts of up to 198 kilometres per hour, it was moving northwest at 25 to 30 kilometres per hour and should make landfall in the early hours of today, Xinhua news agency said.

"East China, including the commercial hub of Shanghai, is preparing for what may be the most destructive typhoon in a decade," the agency said.

The intensity of the typhoon was close to that of Saomai, which killed more than 400 people in China last August and was labelled the strongest storm to hit the country in 50 years, said Chen Hongyi, deputy chief of the meteorological bureau in the coastal city of Taizhou, Xinhua reported.

China's National Meteorological Centre described the storm on its website (www.nmc.gov.cn) as a "super typhoon".

By yesterday evening 1.63 million people in Shanghai, Zhejiang and neighbouring Fujian province had been evacuated, Xinhua said. Shanghai and surrounding cities had ordered all schools to close.

Typhoons, large cyclones known as hurricanes in the West, regularly hit China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan in the summer season, gathering strength from the warm waters of the Pacific or the South China Sea before weakening over land.

Sometimes they can make a u-turn, gather strength at sea again, and return to wreak more havoc.