A series of mudslides tore through mountain villages in Jiangxi province in east-central China before dawn on Saturday, killing at least four people and leaving eight more missing as rescuers dug through debris in the rain.

The disaster struck Suichuan County around 4 a.m. local time after days of torrential rain from Typhoon Saudel collided with a cold front. The worst-hit site, Mingkeng Village in Gaoping Town, was buried, damaging roughly a dozen homes; a separate slide hit Yangfen Village in nearby Zuo'an Town, according to state broadcaster Xinhua.

More than 640 rescue personnel were deployed to the two sites, and authorities relocated over 5,300 residents from the surrounding area as a precaution against further slides, CGTN reported. Search teams were still combing the wreckage for the missing as of Sunday.

A Wider Storm, A Wider Threat

Typhoon Saudel has battered a wide swath of southeastern China in recent days, forcing the evacuation of nearly 600,000 people in coastal Fujian province alone, according to the South China Morning Post. The storm's remnants dumped record rainfall across the region even as it weakened over land, saturating hillsides already softened by an unusually wet summer.

SEARCH TEAMS RACE THE CLOCK AS MORE RAIN THREATENS FRESH SLIDES

Rescue crews are racing against worsening weather, with additional rain forecast to raise the risk of secondary slides in the same area over the coming days. Local officials said the immediate priority remained locating the missing before shifting to a full damage assessment of the homes affected across both villages.

The disaster adds to a grim run of extreme-weather news across Asia this month, following deadly flooding in Nepal and volcanic disruption in Indonesia in recent days — a pattern that has strained emergency-response systems across the region as storm after storm makes landfall in quick succession.

China's Ministry of Emergency Management has increasingly leaned on mass pre-storm relocations rather than after-the-fact rescue as its primary defense against landslide deaths in mountainous provinces like Jiangxi, where steep terrain and dense rural populations make evacuation logistics difficult even with days of warning. Sunday's toll, officials said, would likely have been far worse without the weekend's relocation effort, though the scale of the region's rainfall left little room for confidence that villages considered safe on Saturday would remain so as the week continues.