Chinese flee Iran overland by bus to safety of neighbouring countries

BEIJING - The first Chinese evacuees from Iran have started sharing on social media their desperate efforts to reach the Islamic Republics borders and the safety of Turkmenistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as the Israel-Iran air war entered a sixth day.

Several thousand Chinese nationals are thought to reside in oil-rich Iran, according to state media reports highlighting Beijings efforts to deepen strategic and commercial ties with the theocratic regime over the past two decades.

My heart was pounding but amid the haze of war, everything became clear: I packed my bags and tried to evacuate to the embassy, wrote a Chinese travel blogger under the alias Shuishui Crusoe, a nod to Daniel Defoes fictional castaway, Robinson Crusoe.

The travel blogger had decided to leave after sitting through Israels overnight bombings on June 13 when the conflict began, even as the embassy told advised her to stay put.

Emboldened by news of fellow citizens who made it across to Armenia, 750km from the Iranian capital Tehran, she chose the same route, arriving by bus in the Armenian capital Yerevan on June 16, a day before Chinas embassy officially urged citizens to leave Iran.

China started evacuating its citizens from Tehran to Turkmenistan by overland bus on June 17, a distance of 1,150km, state-run China News Service reported on June 18.

More than 700 Chinese nationals have been transferred to places of safety and more than 1,000 more are in the process of being transferred, Chinas Foreign Ministry said on June 18.

While the embassy emphasised evacuation, some other Chinese netizens still in Iran shared video compilations showing an orderly scenario of well-stocked grocery shops and fruit stalls, with only a couple of clips of large purchases of bottled water.

Most Chinese in Iran are engineers who moved there to work for