CHINA (Bloomberg) - Typhoon Wipha caused about $640 million of damage in eastern China today before being downgraded to a tropical storm as it headed toward the Shanghai region.

Wipha's eye landed near the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province at 2.30am local time, knocking down 2,419 houses and disrupting electricity to 1,867 villages in the province, the official Xinhua news agency reported. A man was killed in Wenzhou when his house collapsed, it said.

Preliminary figures put damage at 3.8 billion yuan in Zhejiang and 1 billion yuan in neighboring Fujian province, Xinhua reported. Miao Jun, a spokesman for the Zhejiang government, declined to comment because he had not received a report on damage from the storm.

The storm's center was forecast to pass to the west of Shanghai by about 8pm local time today, according to the Web site of China's Central Meteorological Bureau. About 30 flights were canceled and the Shanghai Stock Exchange said it would take emergency measures should the storm disrupt trading or communications networks.

"The storm won't have as big an impact as was earlier thought," Zhang Zhenyu, the head of the city's natural disaster department, said by phone today. Shanghai let 290,000 people evacuated yesterday return home at 3.40pm today, he said.

Two million people were evacuated before the storm from coastal areas in Zhejiang and Fujian provinces and in Shanghai. A man was electrocuted yesterday when stepping into a street in Shanghai flooded by rains from Wipha.

The eye of Wipha was near the city of Hangzhou, 147 kilometers south-southwest of Shanghai, at 4pm and heading northwest at 20 kilometers per hour, the Chinese weather agency said. Wipha's winds slowed to 72 kilometers per hour from 185 kilometers per hour when the eye made landfall.

The storm is expected to pass further to the west from Shanghai than forecasters earlier thought, before moving across Anhui and Jiangsu provinces and heading back to sea.

Shanghai's two airports are operating today, after flights were delayed or canceled late yesterday, Zhang said. The airports will assess weather conditions as the storm approaches, he said.

China Eastern Airlines Corp. and Shanghai Airlines Co., the city's two biggest carriers, canceled 30 flights, according to the two companies.

Construction of the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center, China's tallest skyscraper, was halted yesterday, according to a statement on the Shanghai government's website.

Two Women's World Cup soccer matches were postponed today because of the storm, according to the China Daily newspaper.