Three people were killed and 143 injured when a hurricane lashed eastern China Wednesday, turning a rural community into a blizzard of walnut-sized hailstones and falling tree trunks, officials said.

The gale measuring force 12, the maximum on the Beaufort scale, hit Xiao county in Anhui province early Tuesday with a strength unprecedented in the area's recorded history.

"A total of 18,000 houses were destroyed when the hurricane struck," said Yang Nianwu, an official at the county's bureau of civil affairs.

"They either collapsed under toppled trees or were damaged by the hail," he told AFP by telephone from the ravaged area.

The hurricane came during a week of bad weather across China that has proved unusually lethal.

In southwest Sichuan province, seven people, including two girls aged three and seven, were killed and 10 others injured during a lightning strike Sunday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The lightning struck as rainstorms and hail pounded 33 towns in the Liangshan prefecture, affecting 38,000 people and 2,990 hectares (7,305 acres) of cropland.

Forty homes were also destroyed in the area, home to the Yi ethnic minority.

In the northwest Xinjiang region two people drowned and six went missing in mountain torrents on Tuesday, while on Monday at least 14 were killed and 22 were missing after a huge mudslide in southwestern Yunnan province.

Yang, the Xiao county official, described a scene of utter destruction left in the wake of the unprecedented hurricane.

"A million trees were uprooted, and our cotton fields were destroyed by the hail," he said. "The infrastructure was also badly damaged. The power supply stopped."

Equally devastating for an area heavily reliant on agriculture, more than 30,000 domestic animals were injured.

As the locals were tending to the injured, six of whom were seriously hurt, life was slowly returning to normal on Wednesday.

"People are either put up in houses that weren't damaged in the storm, or they hurriedly repair houses hit by the hurricane," said Yang.

While Anhui was recovering from the storm, a heat wave in southern Guangdong province's Dongguan city has claimed 15 lives over the past two weeks, according to figures released Wednesday in the Yangcheng Evening Post.

A total of 255 people from the city were taken to hospitals because of heat-related complications.

Temperatures have fallen in recent days as a result of rain and the situation in the city was under control, the report said.

TERRA.WIRE