BEIJING: Nearly 1,000 Chinese and foreign tourists were evacuated from a resort island off China's southeastern coast as Typhoon Morakot approached landfall, hotel officials and state media reported Thursday.

Chinese soldiers helped evacuate 900 tourists from Nanji island off the coast of Zhejiang province before ferry services were stopped on Thursday, a local news agency said.

A receptionist at the Nanji Grand Hotel, one of two hotels on the island, said all the guests had been evacuated, with only hotel staff remaining through the typhoon.

``We didn't expect the typhoon would be so strong, and had planned to stay on the island for another two days,'' the news agency quoted a tourist from Jinhua city in Zhejiang as saying.

The tourist, who was not named, said soldiers visited each tourist spot on Nanji to tell people to leave, the news agency reported.

Xu Yinglong with China's national meteorological center said heavy rains will pound the southeast provinces of Fujian, Jiangxi and Zhejiang, with the typhoon expected to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday.

The typhoon was centered 590 miles (950 kilometers) east of Zhejiang's coast Thursday morning, with wind speeds up to 70 mph (144 kph).

Taiwan authorities issued sea and land warnings and said people in the north of the island should be on guard for torrential rain. The Central Weather Bureau warned ships in waters off northern and southern Taiwan to brace for the storm. LINK