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BEIJING, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Floods and landslides killed at least 47 people as violent rain storms pummelled China's southern province of Hunan this week, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The toll could rise because mining was a key industry in part of the hard-hit area and many people were working underground at the time of the deluge, it said late on Thursday.

Seasonal floods have killed almost 900 people nationwide since May, including several trapped in coal mines by rising water.

Xinhua said the heaviest rain in years hit a rice growing area in Hunan, some 400 km (250 miles) north of Hong Kong, with a population of about 3.5 million.

It said the losses from the rains, which lashed the area from Tuesday to Thursday, were around 190 million yuan ($23 million) and some 2.3 million tonnes of agricultural products were damaged.

Devastating storms that arrived unseasonably early in parts of China in May and early June had officials worried this year's flooding could surpass that in 1998, which killed more than 4,000 people.

But the storms subsided in late June and July, keeping the damage and death toll from climbing rapidly.

The storms in Hunan caused rivers and runoff ditches to swell and made reservoirs and mountain lakes in the area overflow, Xinhua said. In the city of Chenzhou, 14 of 29 large and medium-sized reservoirs had spilled over.

Officials at the provincial anti-flood office declined to comment, saying they were prohibited from speaking to foreign reporters.

Separately, the official China Daily newspaper said on Friday firefighters had doused five of 10 fires devouring virgin forest in the northern region of Inner Mongolia.

Two of the remaining blazes, sparked by lightning in the Greater Hinggan Mountains in late July, were close to being brought under control, it said. 

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