“Too horrible to look at,” said Xia Bing, who owns concessions along a section of the beach that until Sunday included a cafe called Brother, changing facilities for swimmers and surfers, and a handful of bungalows for overnight guests — all now a twisted mangle of debris and broken branches. Accessories like air-conditioners and a television simply disappeared.

“It was like this when we got back,” he said. “Nothing left.”

Typhoon Mangkhut cut a far more catastrophic swath through the Philippines, where scores were killed in floods and landslides, but it also exacted a considerable toll in China. The storm hammered Hong Kong and Macau on Sunday morning, before moving into the mainland, where at least five people were killed, according to latest government figures cited by the state-run news agency Xinhua on Tuesday. One person is still missing.

In Shenzhen, which abuts Hong Kong, nearly 12,000 trees were knocked over in the city, according to municipal officials, and workers continued to clear roads and highways in the days following.

The recovery in Xichong — a two-hour drive east from Shenzhen’s city center, when fallen limbs have not blocked the roads — could take far longer.