Over 1M evacuated as Typhoon Dolphin batters China's east coast

Typhoon Dolphin crossed into eastern China late Sunday with the force of a Category One hurricane, its 151-kilometer-per-hour winds and torrential rain setting off one of the country's largest peacetime evacuations. More than a million people left their homes. Entire cities mobilized their emergency systems. The storm had already passed through Japan's Okinawa prefecture, injuring six people and cutting electricity to fifty thousand buildings, before it made landfall near the coastal town of Yuhuan in Zhejiang province—the most powerful tropical cyclone to strike China all year.

The scale of the response was immediate and massive. In Wenzhou, a city in Zhejiang, authorities relocated more than nine hundred thousand residents and opened more than a thousand emergency shelters to house them. Shanghai, the country's largest metropolis, evacuated at least thirty thousand people and cancelled roughly fifteen hundred flights. Fujian province, to the south, moved nearly ninety-nine thousand people from high-risk zones after declaring a Level III emergency—the same alert level activated across Zhejiang, Shanghai, and Jiangsu. Offshore, the response was equally sweeping: maritime authorities suspended fifty-five passenger ferry routes, halted all one hundred fifteen offshore construction projects, and moved two hundred ninety construction vessels to protected waters.

The meteorological threat was real and specific. Forecasters warned that parts of central and eastern Zhejiang could receive between two hundred fifty and five hundred millimeters of rain through Monday. The Qiantang, Yong, Jiao, and Shuiyang rivers were flagged as likely to flood. Smaller waterways in the hardest-hit areas could rise above warning levels. Wang Haiping, the chief forecaster at China's National Meteorological Centre, told state television that Dolphin would track westward after landfall, then slow over central and southwestern regions while gradually weakening—but that slowdown carried its own danger. A prolonged passage meant prolonged heavy rain, which meant sustained risk of flooding and landslides, especially in mountainous terrain and along minor rivers where drainage is poor and slopes are steep.

Transport across eastern China fractured under the strain. Flights were cancelled by the hundreds. Ferry services stopped. Roads became impassable. A forty-two-year-old tourist from Guangdong province named Chen found himself stranded in Shanghai after his family's Sunday departure was scrubbed. He and his relatives were rebooked for a Monday evening flight, though whether that plane would actually leave remained uncertain. Chen's perspective was telling: to people from China's southern coast, where typhoons arrive with seasonal regularity, Dolphin seemed unremarkable—just another storm, as ordinary as wind and appetite. But the scale of the official response suggested the authorities were taking no chances.

Authorities had prepared for days. Offshore workers had been moved to safety. Vessels had been ordered back to port. Inspections intensified at reservoirs, mountain streams, areas prone to landslides, construction sites, and tourist destinations. The water resources ministry coordinated with local governments. Maritime authorities worked with port operators. Emergency shelters were stocked and staffed. The machinery of disaster prevention, once activated, ran with the weight of a nation trying to keep a storm from becoming a catastrophe. What remained to be seen was whether the precautions would hold—whether the rain would fall as forecast, whether the rivers would stay within their banks, whether the mountains would hold their slopes. The storm was moving inland now, slowing, weakening, but still carrying enough moisture and momentum to threaten millions of people across a region the size of a small country.