This is the moment the wind blows away a spectacular drone swarm after it was unwisely scheduled to take place during a severe storm.

The video footage was one of three performances scheduled to take place as part of the May Day celebrations in Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China.

However, it had barely started when the drone was battered by strong winds, with occasional lightning and thunder.

Footage shows how the drones were swept away after only making a few shapes in the air for the few bystanders who braved the bad weather.

A total of 400 drones were in the air with a value of RMB 2 million (GBP 222,000) and the next day videos emerged of people collecting the drones, many of which appeared to be damaged and eventually handing them back to the organisers.

It is unclear how many made it back to their docking stations and how many were later recovered.

Mr Xie, the leader of the performance team, said that they had decided to go ahead with the performance schedule for May 4 when disaster struck because the weather forecast was not as bad as it later turned out to be.

He said: 'Suddenly a strong wind came and blew the drones away. They took off at 21:34, and the wind picked up at 21:36 to just two minutes later. There were about 400 drones in the sky at that time. We ordered them to return back to the base station but the wind was too strong and many of them were blown away.

They added that most of the lost drones had not been recovered despite two days of searching.

They added that anybody that finds them will be unable to use them because they are not designed to be used with individual remote controls, and are easily identifiable because they have lights on the bottom.

They said there is a QRcode that can be scanned in to give details about how to return them.