Super typhoon Kongrei is gusting at more than 250 kilometres an hour, and torrential rains are expected as it sweeps across the country.Thousands of people living in its path have already been evacuated, and schools, businesses, and financial markets are closed.

Hundreds of flights have been cancelled, and the defense ministry has put more than 30,000 troops on standby. Our Asia correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, is in Taipei, and he says the whole country is locked down. "So you can see the wind and rain has really picked up a lot here in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, in the last hour or so.

We're now really getting the full force of the storm coming through the capital city.

People are hunkered down here;

the whole island has been closed down;

schools and offices are all closed.

The whole of today, rail services suspended, all domestic flights also have been cancelled.

The brunt of the storm has really been borne by the people on the east coast of Taiwan, where it came ashore a little earlier today. It is an enormous storm;

it's 500 kilometers across;

it is packing winds at the center of over 200 kilometers an hour.

So, it's a very serious storm, and that's why the government has really shut the whole island down.The real danger from storms like this isn't so much the amount of rain that it's carrying, and as it piles into the central mountains of Taiwan, which are very high, it'll start breaking up and dumping all of that rain over the mountains, potentially causing flash flooding and landslides.

We've seen that in the past, where whole villages have been buried in weather events like this. The other thing that's really most noticeable about this particular typhoon, Kong Rui, is that how late it's coming in the season.

Taiwan, we've already had two very big storms here, big typhoons so far this year, the first at the end of July and then another at the end of September, but I've looked back at the records, and I can tell you this, as far as I can see, is the largest typhoon to ever strike Taiwan so late in the season, right at the end of October, beginning of November.

They've never had anything like that before, and people have been really commenting on that. We've seen people on TV here being asked what they think of the typhoon, whether they're worried, and they're saying, "Look, we're used to typhoons here, but what's really strange is this is way, way too late in the season." We've never seen anything, and a 70-year-old man I saw saying, "Look, I've lived here 70 years, I've never seen anything this late in the year in my lifetime." Our Asia correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, in Taipei.