Floods and landslides killed at least 26 people in the Philippines and brought Beijing to a standstill as three tropical storms crossed Asia at once and a fourth formed on Wednesday.

As the remnants of Typhoon Dolphin, the strongest storm to hit China this year, arrived on Wednesday, Beijing suspended 250 bus routes, closed 150 tourist attractions and slowed 10 underground lines, the state news agency Xinhua said.

Meanwhile, Chan-hom made landfall in Japan on Tuesday, while Peilou moved eastwards, away from Taiwan.

A fourth storm, Nangka, which had formed over waters south of Iwo Jima by Wednesday morning, was expected to hold its strength on the way to Japan.

Chinese media described Dolphin, Chan-Hom and Peilou as a rare "three-typhoon situation”.

Footage circulating on the Chinese social media platform Rednote showed a multi-lane road in Beijing turned into a river, with cars and buses half submerged and traffic at a standstill. The northern district of Changping recorded 90.7mm of rain in the hour after 9am, the heaviest hourly rainfall anywhere in the city.

The heaviest loss of life occurred in the Philippines, where monsoon rains intensified by the passing storms set off floods and landslides that killed at least 26 people. Dolphin alone left 10 people dead without making landfall in the country.

In Japan, Chan-hom came ashore in southern Ibaraki prefecture, northeast of Tokyo, late on Tuesday, the first tropical storm or typhoon to make landfall in that prefecture since Japanese records began in 1951. Seven people were slightly injured, two of them in Iwate, four in Ibaraki, and one in Tochigi.

More than 22,000 homes lost power on Tuesday night, though only about 1,000 were still without by Wednesday afternoon, according to Tepco Power Grid.

Trees came down across the city, including in the shopping district of Omotesando, disrupting travel during Japan's Bon holiday week, when families traditionally return home to honour their ancestors.

Nearly 60 flights were cancelled at Tokyo's Haneda airport.

The rain, however, brought brief relief from weeks of extreme heat.

In China, although Dolphin had weakened by Wednesday, its remnants continued to drag tropical moisture far inland.

In the coastal city of Yuhuan, where the storm made landfall, almost 200mm of rain submerged streets and left scores of cars crowded onto a bridge that stayed above the water, according to online footage verified by Reuters.

Records for a single August day were broken in the central province of Hubei, where the steel city of Wugang recorded 209.5mm and Xiangyang 169.1mm of rainfall. State media reported more records were broken in Zhejiang and Henan.

The insurer Ping An said it had received more than 27,000 claims related to the typhoon by Tuesday afternoon, with expected payouts above 650m yuan, or about £70m.

The storms are also driving rain into countries they will not reach. Cambodia's weather authorities said Dolphin, Chan-hom and Peilou together were strengthening the southwest monsoon winds blowing across the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman Sea, the South China Sea and the Mekong basin, and forecast thunderstorms and gusty winds across the country until Friday.

Taiwan sat between the storms all week and was contending with heat rather than wind. Forecasters issued an orange heat alert for parts of Taipei and New Taipei on Wednesday as temperatures reached 38C, and warned of sudden downpours in the southwest as south-westerly winds pulled moisture in from the South China Sea. Xindian, in New Taipei, recorded 36.9C in the early afternoon.

August is typically the busiest month of the Pacific typhoon season but it’s busier than usual this year. Forecasters attribute this largely to a strong El Niño, the warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean which alters weather patterns worldwide and is expected to peak between September and November.

Chinese meteorologists are using AI weather models alongside conventional forecasting to improve warnings after years of extreme rainfall causing billions of dollars of damage by halting factories and destroying crops.

Dolphin travelled about 6,000km before reaching land, an unusually long track for a storm still at that strength.

Scientists say warmer seas give typhoons more energy and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, making the heaviest rainfall heavier.