A Chinese space capsule carrying three crew members has returned to Earth following a 13-day mission, BBC News reported.

Images of the capsule landing in Inner Mongolia at 10:05 local time (02:05 GMT) were shown live on television.

The astronauts, including China's first woman in space, carried out a successful manual docking with the Tiangong-1 laboratory module.

The mission is a key step towards China's goal of building a space station by 2020. Premier Wen Jiabao hailed the mission as a "complete success".

The crew of the Shenzhou-9 craft successfully carried out the country's manual docking maneuver earlier in the week. The delicate procedure, which involved bringing together two orbiting vessels travelling at thousands of miles an hour, was mastered by the USSR and US space teams in the 1960s.

The crew also carried out automatic docking of the two crafts during their mission.