Thick, muddy brown water coursed past the site where two houses had once stood. Tree trunks, shards of road and downed utility poles were strewn on the ground. Dazed villagers crowded around an emergency truck to charge their phones and contact worried loved ones who hadn’t heard from them in days.
Beijing was left reeling on Tuesday, after days of torrential rains there and in surrounding areas led to the deaths of at least 38 people. The severe downpours set off flooding and landslides that trapped residents in their villages and prompted China’s leader to order “all-out” rescue efforts.
The Chinese state broadcaster, CCTV, said on Tuesday that 28 people had died in Miyun, a mountainous district of northeastern Beijing, the Chinese capital, where more than 21 inches of rain had fallen as of midnight on Monday. Two other people died in Yanqing, a district in the capital’s northwest, and eight people in neighboring Hebei Province were killed by a landslide caused by the heavy rain. The broadcaster did not specify when the deaths had been reported.
In the town of Beizhuang, in Miyun, several residents said there had been no warning of the flooding, and that they had first become aware of the danger when they woke up on Monday around 4 or 5 a.m. to water that was already knee-high.
“It was too sudden,” said Chen Jinlan, who was walking along the street away from the town on Tuesday afternoon, toward a highway entrance where her daughter, who lived in the city, was coming to pick her up. Ms. Chen was carrying only her umbrella and her phone, because she had to walk 40 minutes from her village to the first bit of road accessible by car, she said.
In the two days since she had lost power and water, she had been relying on well water and some drinking water that she’d hurried to collect from a tap, she said. It was only hours earlier that her daughter had finally been able to contact her, she said.
She said she had not received handouts of bottled water, though some villagers said they had. Food had not been distributed.
Nearby, a few dozen villagers gathered around a China Unicom truck to charge their cellphones and look for phone signal.
Behind them, the road, which ran along a river, suddenly turned into mud. The collapsed remnants of a white house sagged into the riverbed, beside the empty space where other houses had once stood. A bridge that had once connected to the opposite shore had also been swept away, stranding residents of another village across the water.
Guo Xiuwen said that a dam near her home had collapsed, flooding her courtyard. Trees on her property had been swept away, and her corn crop, which she used for food and to sell, had been destroyed.
“It’s not easy for ordinary people to earn money,” she said, tearing up.
Her neighbor, who gave her surname, Wang, said that her family’s flock of geese and ducks had been buried in mud and died.
Still, Ms. Guo, who said she’d lived in the area for 30 years, couldn’t bear to leave. “It’s my home, I have to watch it,” she said, sitting astride an electric scooter that she was charging by plugging it into the flatbed tricycle of a neighbor.
Elsewhere in Miyun, a resident surnamed Yu said it began raining heavily on Saturday night but she, too, had not received any flood warnings. By the early hours of the next morning, the roads had been inundated and more than a dozen cars were swept away. Firefighters evacuated residents later that day, she said.
Outside Beijing, people were still waiting for help. Wang Haha, a 25-year-old from Yangjiatai, a village in Hebei, said in a phone interview that her family was stuck in their village because roads leading to it had been blocked by landslides. She said that rescue workers had not yet arrived and she had only recently managed to get in contact with her relatives there.
“Mudslides, landslides — villagers are trapped inside and can’t escape,” she said. Ms. Wang, who has been unable to return to the village since the rains started, said some residents had managed to leave by wading through floodwaters and climbing over mountain roads. “Some have managed to get out. But not all of them, just a few.”
More than 80,000 people on the outskirts of the capital have been relocated. Nonessential businesses were ordered to send employees home while schools, construction sites and tourist attractions were temporarily closed. Dozens of roads were damaged, and 136 villages in broader Beijing, which is largely rural despite being within the capital’s administrative area, had lost electricity.
The authorities started releasing water from the Miyun reservoir, the largest in northern China, on Sunday after it recorded its largest inflow since it was built more than 60 years ago.
Signs that the flooding was more severe than usual emerged on Monday evening. Even before the deaths had been announced, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said that heavy rainfall had led to “major casualties and property losses” in Beijing, as well as in Hebei, Shandong and Jilin provinces in recent days, according to Xinhua, the state news agency.
Beijing also issued its highest-level flood alert, urging people not to go outside unless necessary.
Extreme flooding has intensified in China in recent years, a phenomenon experts have linked to global warming. Chen Tao, chief forecaster at the China Meteorological Administration, said in an interview with CCTV that this year, the rainy season in northern China had begun “abnormally early” with the average rainfall almost 30 percent higher than the same period in previous years.
The Beijing News, a Chinese Communist Party-controlled newspaper, reported that Beijing had seen the equivalent of nearly a typical year’s worth of rain in four days.
Information about natural disasters is tightly controlled in China, where the authorities are wary of public anger spreading. On Tuesday, some searches on the social media platform Weibo appeared to be censored. They included discussions of how discharging the Miyun reservoir would flood surrounding areas and whether the death toll was accurate.
Instead, the social media platform featured state media reports of local villagers using forklifts to ferry residents through flooded streets and highlighted details of government rescue efforts.
Deaths caused by heavy rain have been announced in other parts of northern China in recent days, including Shanxi Province, where a bus carrying 14 people went missing. In the city of Jinan, in Shandong Province, at least two people died last week after half of a typical year’s rainfall fell in five hours, state media reported.
In 2023, Beijing was pounded by the most rain it had experienced in 140 years of record-keeping. But most of the damage was in neighboring Hebei Province, where officials said they had opened flood gates to “build a ‘moat’ for the capital.” That led to anger in the affected parts of Hebei, where residents said they had not been given ample warning.
Siyi Zhao contributed research from Miyun in Beijing. Zixu Wang and Joy Dong contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
Lily Kuo is a China correspondent for The Times, reporting from Taipei.
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