Six people were confirmed killed and another 38 soldiers and their relatives were missing after floods destroyed the military barracks in the eastern province of Jiangxi on Wednesday, the state flood control headquarters said.

President Hu Jintao called for "prompt and all out efforts" to find those missing from the barracks, it said in a report on its website.

Jiangxi was one of the areas worst hit by Kaemi, which struck mainland China on Tuesday night before weakening into a tropical storm, with officials reporting nearly 10,000 homes had been destroyed by floods in the province.

Aside from the military barracks disaster, up to 10 other people had been killed in Jiangxi and 26 more people were missing, an official surnamed Chen at the provincial flood headquarters told AFP by phone.

Television footage showed rivers in Jiangxi overflowing their banks and sweeping through valleys and lowlands.

"All regions must strengthen safety work around all reservoirs and earnestly implement prevention work on disasters such as mountain floods, landslides and mudslides," an emergency order by the Jiangxi flood headquarters said.

State press said four other people were killed in flood-related landslides in the southern provinces of Guangdong and Hainan over the past two days.

In Hunan province that neighbors Jiangsu, more than 10 centimeters (four inches) of rain had fallen on counties in mountainous Chenzhou prefecture since Tuesday, the state flood headquarters said.

More than 1.38 million people in Chenzhou were affected by Kaemi's rains, while 6,000 homes collapsed due to flooding and 280,000 people were evacuated.

Across south and southeast China, around one million people had been evacuated from their homes, with state press previously reporting more than 720,000 people had been evacuated from Fujian and Zhejiang provinces.

Worse was expected to come this week with the meteorological administration warning of more rain in much of the south and southeast until Friday night.

Typhoon Kaemi came almost immediately after the end of Tropical Storm Bilis, which claimed more than 600 lives in the same areas of China during a 10-day downpour that began on July 14.

Nearly 300 of the more than 600 lives lost to Tropical Storm Bilis were in the Chenzhou region of Hunan that was again being battered by the aftermath of Kaemi.

Southern and central China has suffered two months of brutal weather, with authorities reporting over the weekend before Kaemi struck that more than 1,300 people had died from weather-related disasters since May.

China's typhoon season normally occurs in August and September.

But Typhoon Chanchu, the first for season this year, hit in mid-May with Kaemi the fifth of the year.

"The main characteristics of this series of typhoons are that they have come earlier than normal and that their effect on the inland areas of China have been rather serious," Yang Ke, a meteorologist with the China Meteorological Administration, said in a statement

One of the worst years on records for typhoon and flood-related disasters was 1998, when more than 3,500 people were killed during the summer.

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