Typhoon Saomai, the most powerful storm to hit China in five decades, raged ashore yesterday killing at least two people, wrecking houses and capsizing ships after 1.5 million residents were evacuated.

Damage was expected to be widespread in areas still recovering from Tropical Storm Bilis, which claimed more than 600 lives last month.

Saomai, with winds of up to 135mph, hit land in China in the coastal town of Mazhan in Zhejiang province.

The area is about 1,000 miles south of the Chinese capital, Beijing, which wasn't affected.

The Zhejiang provincial weather bureau said it was the most powerful storm to strike China since the founding of the communist government in 1949.

Saomai, dubbed a "super typhoon" by Chinese forecasters due to its huge size and high wind speeds, was the eighth major storm of this year's unusually violent typhoon season.

It killed at least two people in the Philippines earlier in the week and dumped rain on Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong, forcing airlines to cancel hundreds of flights.

In China, two people were killed in the southern city of Fuding in Fujian province, which borders Zhejiang to the south, Xinhua said. It didn't give any other details.

Eight Taiwanese sailors were missing after two ships capsized in a harbour in Fujian, while four Chinese were missing after their ship struck a reef, the agency reported.

Before the storm hit China, authorities evacuated 990,000 people from flood-prone areas in Zhejiang and 569,000 from parts of neighbouring Fujian province, Xinhua said.

Xinhua said 80 people were injured and more than 1,000 houses toppled in and around Mazhan. It said 3cm of rain fell in one hour.

Saomai is the Vietnamese name for the planet Venus.

China's weather bureau forecast a summer of powerful typhoons, saying a warm Pacific current would create bigger storms and weather patterns over Tibet would draw them farther inland.

Bilis set off flooding and landslides as far inland as Hunan province, hundreds of miles from the coast.