A 45-year-old peasant woman lies on her couch, an intravenous drip keeping her alive while tears trickle from her eyes.

Distraught relatives and rescuers carry the body of a villager dug out from rubble in Jinxiang Township, Cangnan County in Zhejiang Province, August 11, 2006.  The reported death toll in China from Typhoon Saomai jumped to at least 214, after authorities in southeastern Fujian province said the number of fatalities there had increased to 125. [Xinhua]

Xu Xueqiu is clutching the ID card of her husband, who she has not heard from since August 10, when typhoon Saomai hit Fuding and a neighbour told her that her husband's boat had capsized in the sea.

"How can we live without him," Xu weeps. Her two children, one is 20 and another is 23, take turns to search for their father's body in the morgue but can not find their father.

In the morgue, deformed bodies lie unidentified. Besides each body there are notes like "male; 1.75 meters tall; green shirt of Lining brand and green pants; hair length 10 cm." More bodies are carried there.

In Fuding, similar gut-wrenching stories are heard everywhere.

The death toll in China from Typhoon Saomai has risen to 319, after the discovery of 24 bodies in Fuding city, in southeast China's coastal province of Fujian.

Twenty bodies were pulled from the sea, bringing the number of bodies recovered from the waters off Shacheng harbor to 175.

Officials with Fujian's flood control and drought relief headquarters said the fishermen probably drowned when Saomai broke the moorings on their vessels as they sheltered in the harbor last Thursday.

Another four bodies were discovered on land among the rubble of homes destroyed in the gale.

The death toll in Fuding is likely to rise as 93 people remain missing in the city and search and rescue operations continue.

"This is the biggest calamity Fuding has seen since 1949," said Yang Zhiying, Vice Director with the Fujian Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters.

The wind speed in Fuding, next to the Cangnan County in east China's Zhejiang Province where the typhoon swirled ashore, had reached 252 kilometers per hour when Saomai hit.

All the houses within 20 kilometers of the sea were toppled the moment Saomai landed. Across the city, over 80,000 houses were demolished.

Over 600 of the 2,600 fishing boats in Fuding were sunk in the typhoon. The total economic loss in Fuding so far is 3.1 billion yuan (387.5 million U.S. dollars), 15 times the city's disposable revenue in 2005.

The high number of fatalities is being attributed to the sudden impact of Saomai and the reluctance of fishermen to leave their boats.

According to local sources, some fishermen were afraid that their boats, worth over 1 million yuan (125,000 U.S. dollars) each, would be destroyed and were reluctant to leave, while others drew on their experiences and said the typhoon wouldn't arrive so soon.

The family of each victim has received 5,000 yuan (625 U.S. dollars) in compensation.

The Fujian provincial government has earmarked 24 million yuan (3 million U.S. dollars) in disaster relief funds while local governments provided 12.6 million yuan (1.6 million U.S. dollars) for food, clothing, tent and medical treatment for the affected people.

The city's new death toll has brought total fatalities in Fujian to 230.

Previous reports listed 87 dead and 52 missing in east China's Zhejiang Province, and two dead and one missing in nearby Jiangxi Province. The search for the missing continues.

According to the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), a strong tropical storm Wukong, named after the Chinese legendary figure Monkey King in the classic Chinese novel "Journey to the West", was located 400 kilometers from Kyushu Island in Japan at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

"It may lash the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea with strong wind tomorrow and affect the weather in northeast China," said Ren Fumin, a researcher with the Climate Center of CMA. He believes that Wukong's impact on China will be limited.