Shaanxi earthquake

Project made by Costea Valentin

 Geography

• The Shaanxi earthquake's

epicenter was in the Wei River
Valley in Shaanxi Province,
near the cities of Huaxian,
Weinan and Huayin.
 Shaanxi earthquake

• The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake was a

catastrophic earthquake and is also the
deadliest earthquake on record, killing
approximately 830,000 people.
• It occurred on the morning of 23 January
1556 in Shaanxi, during the Ming Dynasty.
• More than 97 counties in
the provinces of Shaanxi,
Shanxi, Henan, Gansu,
Hebei, Shandong, Hubei,
Hunan, Jiangsu and Anhui
were affected.
• Buildings were damaged
slightly in the cities of
Beijing, Chengdu and
Shanghai.
• An 840-kilometre-wide area was
destroyed,and in some counties as much
as 60% of the population was killed.
• Most of the population in the area at the
time lived in yaodongs, artificial caves in
loess cliffs, many of which collapsed with
catastrophic loss of life.
 Loess caves

• Millions of people at
the time lived in
artificial loess caves
on high cliffs in the
area of the Loess
Plateau.
• Loess is the name for
the silty soil that
windstorms have
deposited on the
plateau over the
ages.
• Modern estimates, based
on geological data, give
the earthquake a
magnitude of
approximately 8 on the
moment magnitude scale
or XI on the Mercalli
scale, though more
recent discoveries have
shown that it was 7.9.
 Cost

• The cost of damage done by the

earthquake is almost impossible to
measure in modern terms.
• The death toll, however, has been
traditionally given as 820,000 to 830,000.
 Foreign reaction

• The Portuguese Dominican friar Gaspar

da Cruz, who visited Guangzhou later in
1556, heard about the earthquake, and
later reported about it in the last chapter of
his book, A Treatise of China (1569).
• He viewed the earthquake as a possible
punishment for people's sins.