Beijing's 14 million residents woke to find their houses, cars and bicycles covered in thick, yellow dust yesterday after the worst spring sandstorms for five years.

Officials said 300,000 tons of sand whipped up by fierce winds in the Gobi desert more than 1,000 miles away were dumped on the city in a storm that began on Sunday evening. It was the second such storm in a week, the eighth of the spring so far, already beating the long-term average of five or six a year.

By yesterday afternoon, the air was still yellow with the dust and pollution left behind and the storm was heading east to South Korea.

Sandstorms have been a problem for centuries in Beijing, which is shielded from the encroaching desert only by a range of mountains to the north-west. But industrialisation, over-extraction of water from aquifers and rivers, and over-ambitious attempts to develop agriculture in the north-west of the country have hugely increased the size of the country's deserts.

Repeated attempts to hold back the tide of sand have involved the planting of more than 40 billion trees across northern China. But environmentalists have warned that many have died, and while those that survived may have shielded the capital from the worst of the sand in the last five years, they may have drained more water from the soil, making things worse in the long run.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/18/wdust18.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/18/ixworld.html