The capital of China woke up on Monday with yellow sky as the biggest sandstorm the country has seen through the city in a decade, causing new health fears.
The thick brown dust enveloped Beijing’s iconic landmarks, including the Forbidden City, and skyscrapers in the city center sometimes disappeared from view, shrouded in clouds of sand.
The China-English news agency CGTN reduced visibility in the capital to less than 1,000 meters (3,300 feet), forcing residents who ventured outside to wear makeshift headgear to protect their faces.
Traffic was hampered and more than 400 flights from the capital’s two main airports were canceled, the Associated Press reported.
The Beijing Meteorological Observatory has warned that the elderly, children and people suffering from respiratory conditions should stay indoors. It said city residents should wear masks, gauze or other dust-resistant products when they go out and wash their faces when they return home.
Schools were also told to suspend extracurricular activities.
“It looks like the end of the world,” Beijing resident Flora Zou, 25, who works in fashion, told Reuters. “In this kind of weather, I really do not really want to be outside.”
The National Meteorological Center of China issued a yellow warning on Monday morning, saying sand and dust coming from neighboring Mongolia would affect 12 provinces and regions in the north, from Xinjiang in the far northwest to Heilongjiang in the northeast and the capital Beijing .
“This is the most intense sandstorm in China in the last ten years, and the area affected by the sandstorm is also the most extensive in the last decade,” the center said in a memorandum on its website.
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The sandstorms were expected to move south to the Yangtze River Delta and would clear up by Wednesday, the Chinese Ministry of Environment said.
Beijing usually faces sandstorms in March and April due to its proximity to the massive Gobi Desert, as well as deforestation and soil erosion in northern China.
China has tried to reforest and restore the ecology of the region to limit how much sand is blown into the capital.
Beijing has planted a so-called ‘large green wall’ of trees to trap incoming dust, and has also tried to create airways that channel the wind and allow sand and other pollution to pass through faster.
The city and surrounding regions have also suffered from relatively high levels of pollution in recent weeks.
Yuliya Talmazan reported from London, Nicole Yang from Hong Kong.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed.