Earthquakes, per Interesting Engineering, occur when the tectonic plates of the Earth’s outermost layer jostle around. There are a number of ways that regions prone to the devastating effects of these natural disasters battle to prepare themselves for such events. For example, base isolation is a means of separating the foundations of vulnerable buildings from the solid ground (or not-so-solid ground in these cases) to reduce the impact of seismic shifts. As explained by Interesting Engineering, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco boasts a foundation that is more than 50 feet deep and brilliantly designed to move with the power of an earthquake rather than against it. The willow tree bends while the oak tree breaks, as the saying goes.

Regardless of humanity’s ingenious defenses, though, some earthquakes just cannot be defended against. In 1556, before some of these mechanical marvels were introduced, the earthquake with the highest death toll in human history struck the Chinese province of Shaanxi, per World Atlas.

According to Britannica, this devastating event took place on January 23, 1556. Although the region had reportedly suffered multiple powerful earthquakes before — 26 others were noted in local reports — this rather unknown yet tragic quake was unlike any that came before it or since. Between the Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, the quake killed a shocking number of people — around 830,000 people lost their lives, a lot of whom were crushed to death by building collapses as the massive tremors shook the region.

An Earth-shattering legacy

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The Shaanxi province was settled in the Neolithic age

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There is still no way to predict earthquakes

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At the time of the devastating quake, the Chinese people were experiencing a rich cultural life under the Ming Dynasty, according to the Metropolitan Museum. There were large-scale manufacturing industries in place that created porcelains and textiles, which in turn boosted the economy, leading to more people enjoying education and prosperity. Artists were breaking free from traditional methods of focusing on the technical to more expressive modes of painting things like landscapes. Woodblock printing meant books were widely produced. The people whose lives were upended by the Shaanxi earthquake were living in a sophisticated era. 

Yet for all of their cultural sophistication, there was no way to predict or escape the planet’s tectonic plates from shifting. In fact, that problem still exists today. According to the United States Geological Survey, regardless of our modern technological advances nearly 500 years later, scientists still can not predict an earthquake — they can only calculate probabilities in that regard. But at least today, engineers plan ahead for natural disasters when designing new buildings in the hopes that such a devastating loss of life due to an earthquake will never happen again.