China has a very long history, the Chinese nation in thousands of years, but also experienced countless setbacks, natural disasters and man-made disasters, only to come to this step today, the past Tangshan earthquake and Wenchuan earthquake, once brought immeasurable losses to the Chinese people, what is even more difficult to accept is the departure of hundreds of thousands of lives.
Fortunately, these two cities have embarked on the road of normal development, and the economic ecology has been effectively restored and even improved.
Even if modern times are backed by powerful productive forces and science and technology, the disasters caused by earthquakes are unbearable, and the horrors of ancient earthquakes are even more desperate.
In the Ming Dynasty's Jiajing 34th year (1556 AD), an unprecedented earthquake was recorded, which occurred in the four counties of Weinan, Huaxian, Huayin and Yongji in Shanxi, so it was called the Huaxian Earthquake. Chinese history books have detailed accounts of the earthquake.
The death toll from the Huaxian earthquake reached a staggering 830,000 (name-based), making it the largest known death toll in the world so far. The "Catalogue of Earthquakes in China" summarizes the description of this earthquake in the historical records as follows: "At the turn of the Qin and Jin Dynasties, the ground suddenly shook, the sound was like ten thousand thunder, the River Plains were cracked, the suburban ruins were relocated, the roads were changed, the trees were upside down, and the quemo was even more anti-wicked."
Nearly eleven provinces in 101 counties were affected by the aftershocks, and many of the 830,000 people who died died after the earthquake.
The Huaxian area was originally densely populated, and many people counted on the crops here to survive, but with the strong earthquake, a large number of farmland were destroyed, resulting in a lot of land being grainless, many people starving to death, and the local residents lived in the caves formed by the Loess Mound, which were not very strong, so it was easy to collapse, and many people were directly buried alive when the earthquake occurred.
Many more are homeless. Landslides caused by earthquakes, mudslides that once blocked the Yellow River, causing the river to be diverted, causing serious damage to the residents of the lower reaches of the Yellow River, some places were seriously flooded, and others were dry and cracked, and there was no grass.
People's lack of attention to hygiene directly led to the emergence of the plague, the plague virus spread between the corpse and the hungry dying living, countless people without a sense of protection, died in batches on the side of the road. In the face of disasters caused by such a large earthquake, the Ming government also appeared to be more than enough and insufficient.
At that time, the world was in the era of Xiaoice, the temperature was reduced, the rainfall was reduced, the grain production throughout China was reduced, many people could not eat enough, and there was an earthquake like this, Jiajing could not take out too much grain to relieve the victims, and could only evacuate the masses as much as possible and distribute a little life-saving food to appease the large number of disaster victims.
Although Jiajing was sympathetic to the people and reduced the tax burden during his reign, he was a relatively good Ming Emperor, and in the 1630s, he also created the situation of Jiajing Zhongxing. However, after the Earthquake in Huaxian County, the national strength of the Ming Dynasty was seriously affected.
Although the later Longqing New Deal and Zhang Juzheng reforms continued to revitalize the Ming Dynasty, the heavens and places did not side with the Ming Dynasty, and successive years of drought, locust famine plagued the Ming Dynasty, which was also a bane of the Ming Dynasty. On the other hand, the Huaxian earthquake also changed The history of China.