Typhoon Dolphin crossed the coast near Yuhuan, in China's Zhejiang province, at about 5.30pm on Sunday local time, carrying maximum sustained winds above 150km/h. It was, according to Chinese meteorological authorities, the strongest tropical cyclone to reach the Chinese mainland this year.
The evacuation ran ahead of it. Wenzhou moved more than 900,000 residents and opened more than 1,000 emergency shelters. Taizhou moved about 390,000. Fujian province, south of the landfall point, moved 98,900. Shanghai, more than 300km up the coast, moved 30,300. State news agency Xinhua put the combined figure above one million.
Air travel stopped with it. About 1,400 flights were cancelled at Shanghai's two main passenger airports on Sunday. More than 180 were cancelled in Taiwan, where ferry services were also suspended as the system tracked past.
China's National Meteorological Centre issued its top level alert and forecast 250 to 500mm of rain for parts of central and eastern Zhejiang through Monday, with the heaviest falls expected as the storm weakened and slowed inland. The Ministry of Water Resources warned of flooding and landslides in the river valleys behind the coast.
Dolphin was rated the equivalent of a category one hurricane at landfall. The number that drove the evacuations was not the wind speed but the rainfall forecast: up to half a metre falling on catchments behind a low, heavily built stretch of coast, with a storm surge arriving on the same tide. The Ministry of Water Resources issued its flood and landslide warnings before the centre crossed, not after.
Dolphin had already been over populated ground before it reached China. Al Jazeera reported on Sunday that at least six people were injured in Japan as the system passed south of the country, and that in the Philippines seven people were missing after a landslide at Baguio, five had been rescued and flooding had displaced more than 12,000. Each of those counts comes from a different national authority on a different day, and they are not added together here.
The storm's track put it across the most industrialised stretch of the Chinese coastline. Zhejiang and the neighbouring Shanghai municipality hold the country's two largest container ports, and the region sits on the manufacturing side of Australia's largest trading relationship. Neither Chinese authorities nor the port operators had published damage assessments by Monday morning.
The effect Australians will notice first is scheduling. Shanghai is a connecting point on a number of Australian itineraries to Europe, and a single day of cancellations on the scale reported on Sunday takes several days to work through an airline's rosters and aircraft positioning.
Chinese forecasters expected the heaviest rain to fall through Monday as the system moved inland and lost intensity. Damage and casualty figures for the mainland had not been released.
