A restaurant owner nearly fell face-down into a pool of scalding hot soup that spilled all over the floor when the pot she was carrying it in suddenly broke.

Surveillance videos show the woman walking across an empty restaurant in the city of Zhaoqing, in Guangdong, China, on the night of January 12.

After they had closed for the day, she prepared some hot chicken soup for dinner with her family.

In the video, she is seen walking out of the kitchen and carrying a big pot in her hands.

Without noticing that the pot was damaged on the bottom, she held it without any tray underneath.

She had only walked a few steps when the cracked pot broke, spilling hot soup across the floor.

The woman accidentally slipped on the soup and tumbled forward, barely managing to hold herself up by the pot's handles before she plopped face-down into the boiling liquid.

Aside from minor burns, she said she was unarmed. She said: 'I'm fine, luckily there were no customers around.'

She added that had been bought for CNY 110 (GBP 12) and used for only a few months, so she did not expect it to break so easily.