Flooding tied to Tropical Storm Maysak has killed 39 people in southern China, with most of the deaths occurring after a dam breach inundated the city of Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Nanning vice mayor Ding Wei disclosed the updated toll at a news briefing on Thursday, saying the dam breach alone accounted for 26 deaths Al Jazeera.

The figure marks a sharp escalation from the casualty counts that Chinese state media had been reporting earlier in the week. Xinhua reported six dead and eleven missing as of Tuesday evening, a toll the State Council's English-language portal reiterated on Wednesday alongside news that Beijing had dispatched additional relief supplies to Guangxi Xinhua english.www.gov.cn. A separate Xinhua dispatch from Tuesday put the toll at four dead and eight missing in Nanning specifically, while an earlier report from Monday cited just two deaths and roughly 55,000 people affected Xinhua Xinhua. None of the Xinhua dispatches reviewed matched the 39-death figure Ding gave Thursday, underscoring how quickly the scale of the disaster came into focus once floodwaters began to recede and rescue crews reached previously cut-off areas.

Maysak brought record rainfall to Guangxi beginning Saturday, July 4, according to the Associated Press, with the storm triggering reservoir breaches and stranding residents in homes and other structures for days AP via Washington Post. The BBC traced the onset of heavy rain to Renhe village starting Sunday, July 5, and reported that the storm also spawned rare tornadoes across the affected region BBC. China's national meteorological centre recorded cumulative rainfall of 10 to 40 centimeters across much of the affected zone, with totals exceeding 90 centimeters in the hardest-hit pockets, Al Jazeera reported.

Roughly 130,000 people were evacuated from Guangxi as floodwaters rose, and the rescue effort ultimately drew more than 8,000 personnel and about 5,700 boats. Ding said Thursday that floodwaters are now receding, though he cautioned that additional rain is expected across parts of the region over the next two days. Electricity has been restored to more than 60,000 homes, he added.

The disaster produced one of its stranger footnotes at Guigang Zoo, also in Guangxi, where flood damage to enclosures allowed at least 100 animals — including alpacas, miniature pigs and zebras — to escape their pens.

China's Ministry of Emergency Management said Maysak was expected to continue affecting the country through Thursday, warning of significant rises in rivers across the Pearl River basin, which drains much of Guangxi and neighboring Guangdong toward the South China Sea iChongqing. The storm's reach extended beyond China's borders: a separate AP dispatch noted that Maysak also brought heavy rain and flooding to Vietnam starting the same weekend AP. The Washington Post's syndication of the AP wire story carried a URL referencing Typhoon Bavi and Taiwan as well, suggesting overlapping tropical systems complicated forecasting and reporting across the region during the same stretch of days.

The widening gap between Xinhua's mid-week figures and Thursday's official tally from Nanning's vice mayor is not unusual for Chinese disaster reporting, where local officials often revise death tolls upward once rescue and recovery operations reach isolated areas and once a dam or reservoir failure — rather than rainfall alone — is confirmed as a discrete cause of death. The dam breach accounting for two-thirds of the overall toll suggests that infrastructure failure, not simply rainfall volume, drove the bulk of the fatalities, a distinction that will likely shape the accountability questions that follow once the immediate rescue phase ends.

No Xinhua report matching the 39-death or 130,000-evacuation figures had surfaced by the time of Al Jazeera's Thursday report, and Al Jazeera's own sourcing rested on Ding Wei's briefing and the national meteorological centre rather than on Xinhua directly. The New York Times, by contrast, had attributed its Tuesday coverage of the flooding to Xinhua via the Associated Press, reflecting the earlier and lower casualty figures circulating at that point in the week New York Times. The discrepancy illustrates the lag that can open between provincial-level briefings and the state wire service's own reporting cadence during a fast-moving disaster, and it leaves open questions about whether further revisions to the toll are likely as recovery work continues into the coming days.