This Week in China’s History: January 23, 1556
In the middle of a winter’s night — January 23, 1556 on the Julian calendar —Qín Kědà 秦可大 was fast asleep, dreaming, when he was violently shaken awake. “I tumbled over and fell to the floor near my bed,” he later wrote, and “heard the utensils in the kitchen moving, and roof tiles clattering.” Qin — a recently graduated scholar living near the city of Xi’an — first imagined that his home had been invaded by thieves. But then — bewildered by a noise that sounded like “the gallop of ten thousand horses” — conjectured that perhaps it was the work of demons. “Finally, as the wall where my head rested came crashing down, I suddenly realized it was an earthquake.”
Not just an earthquake, but a massive seismic shift centered on Shaanxi province that may have been the deadliest earthquake ever experienced. Exact figures are difficult to confirm, but estimates suggest the quake directly killed more than 100,000 people — crushed to death or buried in rubble — and led to the eventual deaths of over 800,000. For comparison, about 300,000 deaths are attributed to the 1976 Tangshan quake. Scholars place the magnitude of the Shaanxi quake at 8.0 on the Richter scale.
Qin described the devastation with bleak statistics. “So many people perished — crushed — it is not possible to register all names. In Tongguan and Puban, seventy percent died, there were sixty percent dead in Huayin, fifty percent in Weinan, forty percent in Lintong, and thirty percent in [Xi’an].”
More powerful than numbers were the eyewitness accounts of devastation. The Ming Veritable Records describe “great crevices opening in the earth” in cities across Shaanxi province. Qin Keda (his records have been excerpted and translated into French by scholar Jean-Paul Poirier) describes what happened after being woken by the tremor: “Hastily I grabbed my clothes…I could barely find my footing, staggering as though I were drunk.” He escaped his house through a gap torn in the wall, finding the rest of his family already outside. “More houses than could be counted were demolished,” he wrote, “I couldn’t hear anything but screams!”
When morning came, Qin surveyed what was left of his city. “Half of the people’s houses had collapsed…People came and went crying, they ran in panic, like bees that have lost their hive.”
Qin relayed news about the rest of the province, describing differing degrees of destruction: “Where the tremor was weak, the walls of the houses tilted…where it was strong everything was immediately and totally ruined. Where the quake was weak, people who had escaped death were still able to take refuge; where it was strong, though there were some who were lucky enough to survive, many were buried and dug out…in Weinan, a city gate sank into the ground…In Tongguan and Puban, the city walls fell, the houses of the common people, the official buildings, were knocked down.”
Qin also records the grim fate of those caught in the quake. “Among those who suffered the tragic disaster, Minister Han was trapped in a furnace, was roasted and his bones reduced to ashes, civil officer Xue was swallowed up in a waterhole ten feet deep, Grand Councilor Ma was buried deep in a hole, and it was very difficult to find his body.”
Records of the quake were also recorded on a stele in Hebei province, housed in a temple to the goddess Nüwa. “At midnight, the earth suddenly shook, the violence was like that of a storm. People were scared, they were coming out of the houses, they couldn’t stand, and they didn’t know what to do.”
Like Qin’s account, the stele illustrates the sheer breadth of the destruction: “Xi’an, and Huazhou, Qian, Yao, Sanyuan, more than ten prefectures and counties reported that on the day and month reported above, the earth shook at the same time, with a sound like thunder claps, the towers of city gates, walls, ramparts, royal palaces, official residences and houses of the common people, warehouses, offices, prisons, swayed and crumbled almost completely, the crushed dead were innumerable in the population.”
The account goes on to mention severe flooding in the quake’s aftermath across several counties, as far as neighboring Shanxi province, where “the land split into gullies, and water burst forth like rivers,” with boiling water overflowing from wells or springing from the rising ground. Meanwhile, flames engulfed the city of Puzhou in Shanxi. “The quake lasted four days, the fire and the continuous smoke did not stop.”
The impact of the 1556 quake remains visible today. In Xi’an, the lesser Wild Goose Pagoda was reduced in height by several meters. The Great Wild Goose pagoda, built to house the scriptures brought back from India by the monk Xuanzang, suffered much more serious damage, losing three of its seven stories (but that damage was repaired when the pagoda was rebuilt later in the Ming dynasty). Xi’an’s Forest of Steles museum was also seriously damaged.
Whether the 1556 Shaanxi quake was the deadliest ever is impossible to determine, and comparing catastrophes is largely pointless anyway. China has had more than its fair share of devastating earthquakes, many of which caused death, displacement, and suffering on enormous scales. In recent memory, the 2008 Sichuan quake left nearly 100,000 dead, with enduring images of parents who lost children when schools — many determined to have been built with substandard practices or materials — collapsed. Three times that many died in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, a tremor also sometimes called China’s deadliest.
Qin is responsible for perhaps the 1556 quake’s most intriguing legacy. Based on his observations, he recommended that people caught inside buildings during an earthquake stay in place, crouching down and covering their head, under furniture if possible, rather than attempt to immediately run outside. Advice like this matches contemporary guidance to crouch in a doorway or under a table if other shelter is not possible, but such instructions appear to have been around for five centuries, a reminder that China’s experience with earthquakes extends back far into the past…and will no doubt continue into the future.
This Week in China’s History is a weekly column.
