Typhoon Dolphin slammed into China's eastern seaboard with 93-mph winds, flooding streets in Shanghai and forcing the evacuation of more than 400,000 people, and the storm system is still pushing inland.
Dolphin made landfall Sunday evening in Taizhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang province, carrying maximum sustained winds of 151 kilometers per hour. It weakened to a tropical storm after hitting shore, but its massive rain bands kept hammering the region into Monday morning. Shanghai, China's second most populated city, took a direct hit from the storm's outer reach, with streets in the suburban Jiading and Qingpu districts still waterlogged hours after the worst of the wind passed.
Unverified live-stream videos shared by residents on social media showed people wading through knee-high murky water in both districts. Reuters noted it had not independently verified the footage. In Wenzhou, farther south along the Zhejiang coast, a TikTok video posted Sunday captured powerful winds flipping a truck. The driver's fate remains unknown.
The scale of the pre-storm response dwarfed the damage reports that have emerged so far. Breitbart reported that more than 420,000 people were evacuated across Zhejiang province and Shanghai ahead of landfall. The AP put the Taizhou evacuation figure alone at over 390,000, with an additional 30,000 moved out of harm's way in Shanghai.
No confirmed death toll or injury count has been reported. That gap is worth noting, not because the absence of casualties is unwelcome, but because China's state media apparatus has a long track record of delayed or incomplete disaster reporting. Whether the evacuation numbers reflect genuine preparedness or political optics remains an open question.
Shanghai's two major airports, Hongqiao and Pudong, bore the brunt of the travel disruption. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported that 943 flights were canceled on Monday, cutting airport capacity by nearly 40%. AP reported a higher figure: more than 1,300 cancellations on Sunday alone, representing roughly 60 percent of that day's scheduled departures. The discrepancy likely reflects different counting windows, Sunday cancellations versus Monday, but neither figure has been independently reconciled.
CCTV described Dolphin as an unusually long-lived storm. It traveled more than 3,700 miles before making landfall, a track that gave it a life-cycle three times longer than a typical typhoon. That extended journey produced what CCTV called an "ultra-large cloud system" that enveloped much of eastern China.
By Monday, Dolphin's rain clouds were still soaking the provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, and Shandong, well north of the original landfall zone. Forecasters predicted 200 to 400 millimeters of rain, roughly eight to sixteen inches, over the following days across the affected region.
And the storm is not finished. Dolphin is forecast to push deeper inland toward the central provinces of Hubei and Henan in the coming days, shoving moisture northward as it goes. Beijing authorities raised warnings for torrential rain and said the capital was prepared to activate its flood control response by Tuesday morning. CCTV reported that Beijing, the neighboring port city of Tianjin, and surrounding Hebei province should expect rain to continue into Thursday as the storm's remnants collide with colder northern air.
The comparison drawing the most attention is to Typhoon Doksuri in 2023. That storm crossed into southeastern Fujian province and then tracked inland, unleashing record-breaking rainfall on Beijing. Doksuri caught the capital's infrastructure off guard and exposed gaps in flood preparedness that officials promised to fix.
Whether those fixes hold is about to be tested. Dolphin's forecast path pushes it toward the same northern corridor, and the capital's flood control apparatus will face its first serious stress test since Doksuri. Beijing's announcement that it stands ready to activate emergency measures Tuesday suggests officials are taking the parallel seriously, or at least want to be seen doing so.
Before reaching China, Dolphin's influence extended well beyond its own track. Its outer bands brought heavy rain to northern Taiwan, and the storm intensified monsoon flooding in the Philippines, compounding an already difficult season across the western Pacific.
Dolphin is the strongest typhoon to strike China so far in 2026. For the millions of residents across eastern and central China still in its path, the real measure of the storm will not be wind speed or travel distance. It will be whether the government's flood defenses and evacuation plans hold up better than they did three years ago, or whether the same failures repeat under a different name.
