The Great Wanggongchang Armory Disaster of 1626 | Episode 97

To begin today’s tale, allow me to share a translation of an ancient Chinese joke: Three men were looking at the clouds. One points to a cloud and says, that cloud is shaped like a horse. Another points to a cloud and says, that one is shaped like a whale. The third man points to a mushroom-shaped cloud, and everyone dies.

On today’s episode: you’ll find out just how badly ancient China wanted nothing to do with you; you’ll learn about an explosion so large, people miles away had to clear limbs and genitals from their rooves; and you would hear about how at the time, ancient disasters were believed to be Heaven’s way of saying your Government sucked.

And if you were listening on Patreon… you would hear about how people were killed in the early development of explosives, including those for whom there wasn’t enough left to put a thermometer in; you would hear about the time San Francisco tried to use dynamite to fight fires, and how that didn’t go as well as you’d think; and you would hear as I climb upon my pulpit and deliver unto you a sermon on blasphemy and the special place in hell reserved for insurance adjusters.

As one supporter who already heard this on Patreon said – "everybody Wanggongchang tonight!"

Jesus himself will make a quick cameo in this story, and he will explain how all sins are forgivable – except for the blasphemous use of his Dad’s name by insurance adjusters, and how there’s a toasty level of hell that awaits them all. Apologies in advance if you work in insurance, but it’s better to find out now.

The last time we visited China, we watched a sideways rocket launch that performed an incomplete orbit over the countryside before landing nose first onto its own launch centre 22 seconds later. Those were the good old days compared to today’s story, which is much older, and much more aggressive. It won’t be as gory of course, but the body count will be much more egregious. In trying to figure out this story’s rightful place in history, I had to start comparing it to meteors and super volcanoes and atomic bombs. Not to spoil anything, but this is one of the more profound disasters we’ve ever covered, and the cause was I believe, something so innocuous and dumb, I’ve done it to my cat by accident before.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
To begin today's tale, allow me to share a translation
of an ancient Chinese joke. Three men were looking at
the clouds. One points to a cloud and says that
cloud is shaped like a horse. Another points to a
cloud and says that one is shaped like a whale.
The third man points to a mushroom shaped cloud and

(00:23):
everyone dies. Hello and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together,

(00:52):
we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre,
and awe inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten des
disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On
today's episode, you'll find out just how badly ancient China
wanted nothing to do with you. You'll learn about an

(01:12):
explosion so large people miles away had to clear limbs
and genitals from their roofs. And you would hear about how,
at the time, ancient disasters were believed to be Heaven's
way of saying your government sucked. And if you were
listening on Patreon, you would hear about how people were
killed in the early development of explosives, including those for

(01:35):
whom there was not enough left to put a thermometer in.
You would hear about the time San Francisco tried to
use dynamite to fight fires, and how that didn't go
as well as you'd think. And you would hear as
I climb upon my pulpit and deliver unto you a
sermon on blasphemy and the special place in Hell reserved

(01:56):
for insurance adjusters. This is not the show you play
around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company.
But as long as you find yourself a little more
historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life,
our work is done. So with all that said, shoot
the kids out of the room, put on your headphones
and safety glasses, and let's begin. Today is going to

(02:25):
be a bit of a big episode. First off, it's
literally four hundred years old. And when your favorite disaster
podcast Cherry picks a story from four hundred years ago,
you know it's going to be good. That is a
long time ago, and to help set the time in
your mind. At the time today's story takes place, the

(02:47):
pilgrims of a newly established Plymouth colony in the New
World were really just starting to die off from all
of the cold and disease and starvation, and of course
the locals, the Atlantic slave trade it would come to
be known, was still in its infancy, and Galileo was
just about to start to piss people off for suggesting

(03:08):
that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
The world's first daily newspaper was still twenty five years away,
which was a shame because these were eventful times. Now
to continue, I am going to say a list of things,
and you are going to guess which are younger or
older than today's story. The piano, it's older. It was

(03:31):
invented around seventeen hundred by Bartolomeo CHRISTOFORI. How about math,
or at least Newton's Principia mathematica version of it. Well,
it's older than that. Math wasn't invented until sixteen eighty seven. Okay,
what about the plague? Remember the Black Death that murdered
about half the population of Europe. Yep, that one. Our

(03:53):
story today actually younger. The plague ran from thirteen forty
seven to thirteen fifty one, although it did stay a
thing all the way into the sixteen hundreds. In sixteen
oh three, the London plague killed thirty six thousand people,
which at the time was about one in five, just
a few years after our story. The sixteen twenty nine

(04:15):
to sixteen thirty one Italian plague killed about one in
five of all Italians, and you can still actually catch
it today, But your chances are about one in thirteen million.
You are about eleven times more likely to be struck
by lightning. One in thirteen million is also your odds
of winning a small lottery, if that makes you feel

(04:36):
any better, a terrible, terrible lottery. But no one is
catching the plague or dying of sepsis or organ failure today.
Today we are marking our triumphant return to what people
called the civilized center of the ancient world. Serica, the
land of Silk, the Middle Kingdom, the home of the

(04:59):
Ming Empire. China the land of temples and monasteries and
teas and tai chi and wushu and kung fu. China
is a land that has conjured mystery in the minds
of outsiders for thousands of years, and for good reason.
When their first emperor, Kin Shiwuan died, they made over

(05:22):
eight thousand life size individual terra cotta warriors just to
protect him in the afterlife. Each was a legitimate piece
of art, and then they were buried, never intended to
be seen by human eyes ever. Again, good luck getting
your head around that. It was especially hard for outsiders
to understand China because it has not always been the

(05:45):
most welcoming place you ever hear of the Great Wall
of China. The Chinese spent over two thousand years building
and building and building a wall the length of their
country as a logistical and ceremonial on welcome mat for
Mongols or other roving hordes, or anyone really who were
looking to set up shop on their territory. And in

(06:08):
all that time they just became more and more isolated.
They saw themselves as the cultural and political center of
the world, and outsiders, nice as they can be, can
really only ever stand to corrupt or destroy a culture.
So they repelled them at every turn. Picture North Sentinel Island,

(06:29):
but on a much grander scale, if you get the reference.
They capped available trade and travel and even diplomacy. It
was possible to visit, but only to certain port cities.
They'd talked to you, but they'd never really took the
chain off the door. They were so lock and key
about everything. Even their own citizens were forbidden to leave.

(06:51):
And because of this, we have all become like anthropologists
trying to guess what they're really like, and we miss
the mark sometimes even in the simplest manner. For example,
a lot of the stuff that the world calls Chinese food,
well they don't. Peaking duck is legit. But Chop suey
and General SU's chicken and Fortune cookies, Nope, not so much. Now.

(07:14):
The last time we were here, we spent our time
at the Xishang satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province in
the southwestern part of the country, and if I remember correctly,
we watched a sideways rocket launch that performed an incomplete
orbit over the countryside before coming to a landing nose
first onto its own launch center twenty two seconds later. Well,

(07:38):
here is what I can tell you about today's story.
By the time I say the end and you take
off your headphones and safety glasses, you will be yearning
for the calming detonation of three hundred and ninety tons
of fuel that was near Zishang in Sichuan Province. Like
we said, well, today we will be heading about eighteen

(07:59):
hundred kilometers or eleven hundred miles northeast to a little
place called Beijing. Maybe you've heard about it before. It
is hard to keep Beijing a secret. We are talking
about one of the world's largest cities. It's also the
capital of China. Beijing is the place where emperors of

(08:20):
antiquity held sway over the fourth largest country in the
world for thousands of years, and it's grown quite a
bit in that time. The current population is about one
point four billion. It has over one hundred cities of
over a million people each. And these are cities that
look like the future, where the entire skylines appear to

(08:44):
be wrapped in led screens. It's become home to six
hundred kilometer or three hundred and seventy mile per hour
commuter trains and drone shows in the sky that are
better than television. When you think of a megacity, now
that's a city of ten million, China has got six
of them. There are literally only seven other cities around

(09:06):
the world larger than Beijing. It is home to twenty
one million people. I mean, that is half the population
of Canada right there in one postal code. And for
the last six hundred years, at the heart of Beijing
stands the Forbidden City. For over five hundred years, twenty

(09:28):
four different emperors spanning the Ming and Qing dynasties have
called it home. They call it China's imperial heart, and
you're allowed to think of it as China headquarters, but
that really oversimplifies what UNESCO calls the world's largest palace
complex and one of the most important cultural treasures on earth.

(09:50):
If you have ever had a chance to drive past
the Pentagon, just picture that and now add another twenty percent.
This thing spans one one hundred and eighty acres. That's
seven hundred and twenty thousand square meters or almost eight
million square feet. That is enough space to park almost
seventy one thousand Dodge caravans. And it's not just one

(10:15):
giant building, obviously, it's a complex of nine hundred and
eighty buildings, but the largest is the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
You can think of it as the Throne Hall. It's
where the empire held its more important rituals. And without
turning this into a home and garden podcast, I will
just say it was the grandest and most architecturally sophisticated

(10:38):
single wooden structure in the world. Nothing compared to its
size and grandeur and ornamentation and engineering as a single
wooden ceremonial building. Today, you'd compare it to be about
the size of a modern urban large grocery store if
your grocery store sat on a twenty six five three

(11:00):
tiered white marble terrace. And I'm really glad that you're
here with us today because getting this close is an
incredible rarity for outsiders. You remember how I described Chinese
hospitality as having a real piss off kind of vibe.
While surrounding the palace are walls that rise as high
as fifteen meters in parts, that's about thirty five feet

(11:23):
plus the battlements, which are these kind of sentry towers
that will happily pepper you with arrows or cauldrons of
boiling oil or other more explosive weapons, which we'll come
back to. This is a place that knows how to
make you feel unwelcome. And just in case you can't
take a hint, it's also surrounded with a fifty two

(11:45):
meter or one hundred and seventy foot wide moat. This
thing has an average depth of twenty feet and it
would take about a minute and a half to swim across.
But that's okay. There's no swim test. In today's story,
we're going to be spending our time inside the crimson
walls of the Emperor's walled Palace. Anyways, we're going to
step outside its western gate and travel about two and

(12:09):
a half kilometers or one and a half miles west
through Tianamen Square and the Xicheng District until we reach
wangong Chang. And I haven't mentioned it, but we have
walked all the way to Beijing's inner city wall walls
within walls, each with the same purpose and telling the
same story. Not today stranger. Fu sheng Men was one

(12:33):
of nine massive gates that once controlled access into the
heart of the capitol. Fu sheng Men was the main
western entrance, and the name means Gate of abundant success.
They loved these auspicious names, like the Gate of Peace
and Stability, and the Gate of proclaiming military virtue and
the Gate of virtuous victory. Wangancheng itself was an important

(12:58):
district in the western heart of Beijing's bustling inner city.
It's a mixed use part of town, part military, part
residential district, and that is where we will be spending
our time today. Each day in the city was greeted
with the ringing of a great bronze ceremonial bell in
the Great Tower Jeglu, while the streets of Beijing slowly

(13:22):
come to life. There was no snooze bell between the
bell and the beating of a massive drum from the
drum Tower of Gulo. Citizens knew when the gates were
opening and closing and window open, shop or get to work,
or stay indoors, or applaud the emperor, just whatever. Around

(13:42):
the palace stretched a city of broad ceremonial avenues, giving
way to crowded, narrow alleyways that criss crossed the city
in a grid where families lived in small courtyard homes
and jostled through bustling markets, and everything was public. Back then,
every staple of life came from bartering with vendors with
stalls or carts full of breakfast or clothing, or plates

(14:05):
or hats or spices, you name it. Every drop of
water in your home had to be drawn from a
public well and then carried there while trying not to
be run over by rickshaws pulling noblemen and other uppitty ups.
The streets were alive with the rambling clamor of a
million voices the plaque of hoofs on stone paved roads,

(14:26):
the cries of peddlers hawking their wares, blacksmith hammers, a
cacophony of animal noises, just everything. People from wealthy households
wore silk and dined on mutton or duck, while common
folk relied on millet or noodles and the occasional pork,
which is really no different than it is here in
North America. We could maybe go see a storyteller or

(14:48):
an opera troop at a teahouse, or maybe we could
go burn some incense at a shrine to seek some
extra dimensional blessings. Certainly, there is a lot to see
and do here, but we it did not walk all
this way from the palace just to day drink and
spirit walk. No. We talked about a lot of Chinese

(15:08):
inventiveness right off the top, But the one thing we
barely mentioned that they are quite famously connected to is gunpowder.
They have been playing with the stuff since the beginning
of the modern era. Two thousand years ago. Early alchemists,
playing around with the components trying to make immortality potions,

(15:29):
accidentally stumbled onto the recipe for a mortality potion that
when heated would blow your hands and face off. A
couple of early workshops in Shindhu and Kaifeng quote vanished
in fire clouds. And it did not take long to
figure out that this stuff needed to be kept sealed
away from anything from open flame to the smallest spark.

(15:52):
And it didn't take long for the military to figure well,
if it blew the faces off Daoist chemists, it could
do the same same to foreign enemies. And they were all,
let me see that, and history was written. By the
eight hundreds. They had their recipe for controlled explosives, and
a whole industry rose up around it. And the government

(16:15):
held that recipe tighter thand KFC's eleven herbs and spices.
They went so far as to control the very production
and sales of the components to keep people from making
it themselves. And this isn't going to turn into an
anarchist cookbook podcast, so I am not sharing that recipe
with you here. Let me just say that the ingredients

(16:37):
rhymed with dulfer far coal and glotassium blytrate. Before long,
the military had used this destructive elixir to make explosive
arrows and catapult bombs, and early hand grenades, and eventually
hand cannons and rockets. By the thirteenth century, they had
developed a multi rocket firing system called the Nest of Bees.

(17:02):
At first, all these early weapon types mostly just blew
people's arms off, which at best may be served as
a red flag warning to others to stay back. Now,
storing this kind of thing became a big deal. Let's
see for ourselves. We did not walk all this way
from the palace just for our health. We will be
visiting the Imperial gunpowder factory, armory and depot, which came

(17:26):
to be known as Wang goong Chang. It literally means
Prince Wang's factory slash workshop. Spreading across Beijing were more
armories and arms factories and depots and workshops and weapon
caches than your town probably has gas stations. The five
largest were and I will preapologize for any mispronunciations Sheng

(17:49):
goong Chang. They produced bows and crossbows and armour. Xing
Sheng produced arrows and things that fly through the air.
Jong Wu Chang produced spears, poles and pole based axes,
and just general stabables. Jishan Cheng produced heavy equipment and
large firearms like cannons, and wang gong Chang where we
are today. Well, here they focus on gunpowder and cannon

(18:14):
balls and small arms ammunition, things that explode, and together
they gave the Emperor control over the capital's armaments supply,
you know, just in case any roving horde decided to
take that long swim across the moat. Wang Gonchang they
put out roughly one point eight tons of gunpowder in
a week, and typically they would store anywhere from a

(18:37):
few days to several months supply on hand for a
rainy day. Wang gon Chang was a sprawling complex of
courtyards and workshops and storehouses surrounded by a high wall.
There were drying sheds for gunpowder, paste, smithing, and casting,
furnaces for weapon production, and of course storehouses and even

(18:58):
some residential quarters. This was definitely the kind of place
that you wanted to keep secure against marauders or lightning
or God or whatever. Only about seventy or eighty people
work there, but that's actually quite a few, considering that
most of the facility was dedicated to storage. And you'll
remember how well built the fortifications around the city were,

(19:20):
while this armory had thick rammed earth walls around load
bearing timber framing, tiled roofs, and floors solid enough to
carry heavy loads without deforming. Those walls would have been
as thick as two and a half meters or eight feet.
And if you don't know what rammed earth is, it's
this ancient technique where they used to compact it and

(19:42):
beat it with wooden rammers until it became as hard
as rock, and then they plastered it with lime or
clay to make it waterproof. All of that was then
faced with brick, which was called fire brick, which was
another ancient Chinese secret way of making bricks incredibly tough.
It's been said that a ten meters or thirty foot

(20:02):
long section of this kind of wall would have weighed
as much as twenty two Dodge caravans, that's about one
hundred tons. It was enough that when accidents happened, and
they did happen, workers who found themselves buried were well buried,
buried like for good. Even the interior walls were about

(20:24):
two feet thick. Chinese public architecture of the time used
massive timber posts and beams up to sixteen inches around,
positioned about ten feet apart, and then latticed with cross
beams weighing hundreds of pounds, all to support the roof,
which weighed as much as fifty tons. Most things made

(20:44):
of wood creek, but not this place. This place was
built to last. Walking into wangong Chang, you would have
seen rows of squat, thick walled halls with heavy timber doors,
and barrels of gunpowder everywhere. It's a lot. So let's
take a step backwards and get some air. So let's

(21:06):
take a step back outside and get some air. Our
story takes place early on the morning of May the thirtieth,
sixteen twenty six, a Wednesday. It was a peaceful morning,
people milling about, birds flying overhead, a perfectly unremarkable day
right up until it wasn't. I don't want to scare you,

(21:30):
so I am going to let the next few seconds
do it for me. About nine am, the peace was
broken by an odd thunderous rumbling, followed almost immediately by
a great white flash and a deafening concuss of blast,
which was described as sky breaking. Witnesses said that it

(21:51):
was immediately blindingly bright, deafeningly loud, and physically overwhelming, and
that the earth itself felt like it sank or drop
beneath them, and before you could even begin to think,
a massive pressure wave raced forward, turning everything to shrapnel,
accelerating outward at super sonic speed. Imagine buying some noodles

(22:12):
off a cart and then you shut your eyes for
one second, and now you are naked and flying through
the air uncontrollably. The blast was powerful enough to even
damage the city's impossibly thick walls. The shock wave that
came off of this thing leveled building's entire kilometers away.
And when I think about it, shaved maybe the best

(22:33):
way to describe it, like the landscape, the homes and
the trees and just all of it was shaved smooth.
Entire neighborhoods from shuncheng Ben Street in the east to
Jingbu Street in the north collapsed, and if you don't
have your map handy, that was a distance of maybe
four miles or as much as six kilometers. Basically everything

(22:55):
within a thirteen mile or twenty kilometer radius was pulverized.
Tens of thousands of people were killed or injured. The
force was more than enough to strip the clothes off
people for kilometers, and most of the bodies were said
to be nude. Clothing was found miles away in trees
and in nearby mountains. Most wouldn't have even had the

(23:18):
chance to see or hear it fully. They simply would
have been knocked unconscious or killed where they stood, and
corpses were piled high like leaves, raked or blown away
from a central point. Others were simply ragged all through
the air with complete abandon to be found in trees
or on roofs, and they were described by one survivor

(23:38):
as having incomplete heads and limbs beyond recognition. Most of
the bodies were missing parts, and there are anecdotes of
people standing mining their own business when debris ripped their
heads clean off, never to be seen again. The deceased were,
for all intents given the same approximate treatment of a
transporter accident, and then frisbeeed away at hundreds of kilometers

(24:03):
an hour, and although no records were kept to indicate
just how far human bodies and flaming body parts were
said to rain down at great distances, watching limbs fall
from the sky miles away felt like a sign of
the apocalypse, and those human organs and other earthly debris
would have fallen for whole minutes. As many as thirty

(24:25):
thousand people were thought to have died in a blast
that lasted no longer than a few hundreds of a second.
The amount of energy needed to create or destroy everything
I just described, All that power was channeled and released
in about half the time it takes to blink. If
you had just started to blink as this began, your

(24:46):
eyes would still be closed before you died. In the
simplest terms, the explosion was over in less than a
blink of an eye. The blast wave would have traveled
through the city at about three hundred and thirty meters
per second, that is the speed of sound traveling through air.
And to give you a sense of just how powerful
it was, there had been a statue of a lion

(25:08):
weighing thousands of pounds that had been lifted and flung
through the air, and it landed on its own ass
of little crooked mind you, about one kilometer or six
tenths of a mile away. Almost immediately. Watchtower guards would
have sounded alarms. Of course, sirens wouldn't be invented for
another two hundred years, so they struck signal gongs while

(25:30):
the drum tower beat out an emergency code. I'm not
really sure why, though. It feels like the explosion was
the worst kept secret in Beijing history, and I imagine
most people would be deaf by now. Residents ran out
into the streets barefoot, dazed, bleeding from the ears, and
the eerie silence that followed in the wake of the
explosion would be phased out in favor of the screaming

(25:53):
of survivors as they came to and realized what had happened.
Corpses lay everywhere, Tiles and stones covered the streets like snow.
The closest city wall had been scorched black. The entire
city reeked of burnt sulfur, and flaming embers rained down
on homes and businesses. Many said it had been as

(26:16):
bright as the sun and roared like ten thousand drums.
This was a noise loud enough to be heard clearly
one hundred and fifty kilometers or ninety five miles away.
All those people that were found, staggered and dazed, and
of course nude, watched as a great black column of
smoke rose upwards, mushrooming out at the top, together with

(26:38):
a rolling black and brown dust cloud that turned day
into night, which only instigated choking darkness and chaos. Streets
were clogged with rubble and wooden frame. Buildings far away
from the blast burned and smoldered in the darkness created
by all the lingering dust in the air. People formed
human chains to bucket water from neighborhood wells, nearby rivers,

(27:01):
and even the palace moat. The closest thing to a
fire hose at the time was called a hand pumped
water syringe. You can think of it as a traveling
water barrel that could shoot water all of about ten feet.
Many other smothered small fires with earth and sand, which
again is always the most tried and true method of
extinguishing fire. To prevent the fires from spreading, people used

(27:25):
axes and saws and crowbars to pull down half burned
homes to rob it of fuel and create fire breaks.
By the time evening fell, the entire city was smoky
with the stench of burnt wood and powder, and flesh
corpses buried under rubble continued smoldering like horrific scented candles.

(27:46):
When the smoke did finally clear, residents found a magnificent
smoldering crater so hot to the touch that you could
have lit a cigarette off it, except for the part
where cigarettes weren't invented until the eighteen forties, but that's
not really important. At the moment, the crater was as
much as fifty meters or one hundred and sixty five

(28:06):
feet across and sixteen meters or fifty feet deep. So
you're rubbing a balloon on your head at work when
a thunderous white flash rips open the earth, leveling entire
blocks and ripping off all your clothes, would you know
what to do? When Wan Kon Cheng exploded. Survivors weren't

(28:29):
just lucky. A lot of them were protected by some instinctual,
reactive bias that had them hitting the deck for cover.
So let's see if we can turn those instincts into
practices in case you ever find yourself suddenly faced with
an unexpected explosion. The first and maybe worst part of
the experience is going to be the shockwave. It moves

(28:53):
faster than sound, so the moment that you register a
flash or feel a sudden heat or a big change
in the air pressure, drop down flat face first immediately.
The closer you make it to the ground, the less
surface area of your body needs to absorb all of
that pressure or flying debris. In a perfect world, you

(29:14):
would see this thing coming and you would have enough
time to finish your coffee and then find a nice,
dirty piece of cover to hide behind, or maybe a
sewer to climb into. But with time being of the essence,
I am happy to find out that you were simply
able to position yourself face down with your feet pointing
towards the blast. It is a lot more preferable to

(29:37):
be pulling shards of brick out of your feet than
your skull. Your head, neck in, your lungs are the
most vulnerable, so obviously you're going to want to cover
your head with your arms, or a backpack or a
manhole cover, or just anything handy that you could use
as a makeshift shield. Covering your ears with your palms
can help keep your ear drums from rupturing, but it's

(30:00):
better to survive without your hearing than your skull cap.
You're also going to want to keep your mouth slightly
open to equalize the pressure around you so your lungs
don't pop. Now, once the blast wave passes, don't move
stay down. In a big enough explosion, there is always
a secondary wave, an explosion is like a huge fireball,

(30:21):
and fire consumes air, and now a huge volume of
air is gone, leaving a vacuum behind that now wants
to refill itself as quickly as possible, and that means
a lot of debris and fire are going to boomerang
back to the starting point. And since you're not an
expert at caging explosions, the general rule of thumb is

(30:42):
don't move till you can't hear the tinkling of debris anymore.
This may take a while, as you may need to
be fitted for hearing aids. And if you were inside
when this happened and you were near a window or glass,
bad move. Glass is going to fragment and eviscerate you,
so you will want to move away from it and
put as much shielding between you and it as you

(31:04):
can find. TV and movies have taught us the best
way to do this is with a one handed sideways cartwheel.
You'll want to start with your feet apart and your
arms raised, lean towards the ground with the hand closest
to the direction you're moving, kicking your legs up and
over sideways like you're tracing a big rainbow with your feet,

(31:25):
keep your body straight as you twirl over your hand.
One leg goes up first, then the other follows, until
you have done a full three sixty landing on your feet,
still facing the same way that you started, and then
hide behind some heavy furniture or something. Once the blast passes,
cover your nose and mouth with your shirt to avoid
inhaling dust or smoke, and then leave. If you are

(31:49):
inside a building that's just been rocked by an explosion,
I want you to ask yourself if you trust your
life to the people who slapped the thing together, you
want to move towards open space, away from any leaning
walls or potential falling debris. After that, you may run
into others who've suffered any number of horrific injuries that

(32:09):
we just can't cover here. But if you are able
to help, you should, And it might be helpful to
go back and listen to our entire catalog to refresh
yourself on the various treatments that you might need to employ,
and note patreons. All the older episodes are now available
ad free for everyone else. Just remember drop, cover, Breathe, Survive,

(32:37):
so faschung l Shunma sure all the ingredients for explosives
and gunpowder had been stored separately to prevent exactly this
kind of thing. All the containers were made out of
wood instead of iron or stone, so nothing that could
scratch out a spark. They had thought of everything, So
what the hell happened? Well, the scariest part except for

(33:01):
the actual blast and the dying and the blood rain
and getting slapped by severed hands. They never really figured
out the exact cause of the explosion. The cause has
been studied and debated for centuries. Historians and scientists have
never been able to agree, so no consensus has ever

(33:21):
been reached. But the most plausible cause was a manufacturing
upsie doodle. Someone maybe touched a metal object and created
an electrostatic shock, like the way you might shuffle across
a carpet. To Zappa sibling, The idea that a person
could become electrostatically charged like this and then transfer that
charge into an object wouldn't start to be understood for

(33:44):
another one hundred and ten years. It's possible that a
few of the workers were just excited about their work
and gave each other playful noogies, which created static potential
in their hair, which then transferred to an object surrounded
by flammable dust, one thing would have led to another,
and the entire facility became a very loud memory. If true,

(34:08):
this has to be the most innocuous, if not unintentionally
stupidest cause of a disaster we have ever discussed on
this show. There was great debate about the level of
fire damage at the heart of the explosion, and the
shape of the cloud produced and the resulting nudity that
just confused the experts for years, and my viewpoint is

(34:30):
that weird things happen in explosions. In nineteen eighty six,
a show of hands at a conference in Beijing favored
the idea that seismic activity released subterranean gases that combined
with gunpowder, which then ignited and magnified the explosion, even
though Beijing is not known for massive and volatile natural

(34:52):
gas deposits. That said, if this was conclusively proven, an
earthquake setting off a blowtorch underneath and explosives filled depot
would have been the most heavy metal cause of a
disaster that we have ever discussed on this show. In
twenty thirteen, researchers came up with the theory that a

(35:12):
tornado blew up, the armory created all of its own
damage and then ripped off everyone's clothes. And I know
it feels like they are picking at straws. So it
is worth noting that prior to this the armory, sitting
on top of an underground volcano and being hit by
a meteor were also proposed and studied theories. I don't

(35:34):
know how much these people get paid, but I'd like
to get paid to just say stuff. And I do
have my own personal theory that seems really really straightforward
that in all the reading that I had done, no
one else thought to explore. See. Like we said earlier,
gunpowder was extremely sensitive to moisture. In armories, powder was
stored in wooden barrels lined with oiled paper or silk,

(35:57):
and humidity was countered by heating storage rooms with charcoal braziers.
If you don't know what that is, it's basically a tiny, little, small,
open sided barbecue, big enough for a single briquette. It
might not have an actual open flame, but the ceilings
have been marked with soot from lanterns because light bulbs
were hundreds of years away, and it's not like workers

(36:17):
were expected to stumble from barrel to barrel, feeling their
way around in the dark. I described how well built
and massive the building was, but that very mass worked
against it. All the architectural strengths we described, the thick walls,
the heavy roof tiles, the mass of beams. You think
that might help contain an explosion, but ironically it actually

(36:40):
increased the violence when thousands of barrels ignited simultaneously. The
dense walls and roof didn't vent the pressure. It trapped
it and contained it until the entire complex atomized. They
trapped energy that converted into shattering pressure and provided enormous
quantities of secondary shrapnel in missiles and debris to announce

(37:02):
its approach. A lighter or vented wooden building like something
you'd find at home depot's shed department might have burned
down and curploded, but not here. The main Court investigated
as best as they could given their abilities at the time.
And when I said there's no record of exactly how
much material went up in the explosion, what I mean

(37:24):
to say is, of course there was, But like a
magic eraser, the explosion destroyed any records and snuffed out
anyone who might also have reason to know. The most
popular retelling places it somewhere between ten and twenty thousand tons.
Now I have heard as much as sixty, but it

(37:44):
is so easy to want to sensationalize, So let's just
not at twenty thousand tons. That is the equivalent to
as much as twenty kilo tons of TNT going off.
That is more than enough to power your home for
a few thousand years, or blow it to Saturn in
under a week. This would have been enough to leave

(38:05):
seismograph squiggles as strong as magnitude three point five, which
by itself isn't enough to cause great damage, but is
more than sufficient to shake your bowels empty. For comparison,
the Beroot explosion from twenty twenty was estimated at about
somewhere between half and one kiloton. For a pre industrial city,

(38:25):
a twenty kiloton blast would have been apocalyptic. He can
only imagine the psychological impact of witnessing what you must
believe to be a divine punishment or just the end
of the world. The historical records were written in a
time before modern forensics or a good understanding of physics.
They were often filtered through moral or cosmological or political

(38:49):
interpretations and because of that. In the end, the court
ruled that this had been a simple act of or
punishment from Heaven. Now there was talk about human mishandling
and poor storage of the explosives playing a role, but
no one was ever found to be responsible, just God.

(39:10):
Other theories included everything from lightning to static to heat
build up to a natural gas pocket, to chemical instability
in the gunpowder itself, all the way to sabotage or
a meteor air burst. All that said, please allow me
to now blow your mind at the historical significance of
this thing that has happened. This may sound weird, and

(39:33):
it's weird to say, but when looking backwards to determine
the last time there was an explosion this large, it
may have been the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in seventy
nine CE, and Wangon Cheng might actually have been worse.
I want you to think about it this way. The
explosion of Mount Vesuvius released the power of hundreds of

(39:55):
kilotons of TNT, but it was released over the course
of two days. Wangon Chang released ten to twenty kilotons
of it in a second. It was the largest sudden
bomb like explosion created by humans before the modern age,
which is a huge boast. Nothing really compares until you

(40:17):
really hunker down and start looking for its peers, and
at that point you start to consider meteor impacts. The
Cheliabank medior of twenty thirteen was four hundred times more powerful,
but this happened about thirty kilometers or nineteen miles in
the air above the middle of nowhere. The Tunguska medior
of nineteen oh eight was ten thousand times more powerful,

(40:39):
but that happened about ten kilometers or six miles in
the air, but was way more remote. Our explosion happened
at ground level in one of the biggest cities in
the world. The last time we had a street level
explosion this large may have actually been the Chick Salube
meteor sixty six million years ago. I also tried to

(41:02):
figure out how long it was before Earth faced another
blast as powerful as this, and there were dozens of
recorded major accidents since sixteen twenty six, but none larger
than our story today. So as man made explosions go,
it's popular to say that it was the biggest for
another two hundred and ninety one years, all the way

(41:22):
to the Halifax explosion of nineteen seventeen, but that was
only three kilotons as near as I can tell, if
the ten to twenty kiloton yield is accurate. The next
largest explosion in history didn't occur until July the sixteenth,
nineteen forty five, at the White Sands Proving Ground in
the New Mexico Desert. The source of the explosion was

(41:45):
innocuously called the Gadget and the event was called the
Trinity Test, but historians remember it as the world's first
nuclear explosion and the dawn of the entire nuclear age.
Off topic, both the UN and Russia have recently decided
to green light full nuclear testing again after more than
thirty years of naught. So I just wanted to take

(42:08):
a moment to thank you all for listening and say
if you ever considered donating to the Patreon, now may
be the time. But back to China, So, how big
a deal was all of this? Ju Yujiao was emperor
at the time, and he'd only been on the job
for two years, and he wasn't the most popular emperor ever.

(42:30):
There was a famine going on, there was rebellion going on,
and the Manchus were giving it to him up the
south from the north. If you follow my meaning, it
was getting hard to be a Ming. In Ming political culture,
disasters were interpreted as heavenly warnings, and many officials and
many officials and citizens interpreted this one as a bad

(42:51):
omen about the corruption of the court. Like we said,
people believed that their rulers couldn't protect them. They couldn't
even protect their own city. In sixteen twenty six, every comet,
or drought or two headed sheep born was reported to
the Astronomical Bureau for study, and within hours of the explosion,
the Imperial Court found itself thrown into chaos. In China,

(43:15):
heaven was a governing principle, and the emperor had clearly
lost the mandate of heaven. Normally, you could expect heaven
to express its displeasure through eclipses or earthquakes or plagues,
but this would do. Ju Yujao wasn't injured in the explosion,
but he was shaken, and they said he trembled inconsolably

(43:36):
for days. He knew he was in deep and all
discussion of non celestial causes, you know, things like sparks
or negligence, they were banned, which of course, made investigating
the thing kind of difficult. Instead, they were told about
a red vapor that was seen in the northern sky
the night before, which was obviously the fiery dragon of

(43:59):
heaven descended to proclaim the elixir that man had once stolen.
The Emperor himself prayed for forgiveness, while the palace ordered
three days of fasting, no more music, no banquets, no
celebrations or weddings or birthdays, no humming, no smiling. And
this will sound weird, but the emperor quite famously preferred

(44:21):
carpentry to actually governing people. It was said that he
often ignored his duties to spend his time off building
miniature furniture, So the idea that he was off putting
the finishing touches on a mouse size credenza when the
explosion took place infuriated people, and not just him. His
head minister had been a man named Weishang Xien, who

(44:44):
was equally unpopular and had a reputation for making political
opponents disappear, and after the explosion he was out there
preaching a very nothing to see here version of the story.
So let's fast forward one year. The emperor falls over
dead and people debate whether he just up and got
sick and died or he was poisoned. Either way, his

(45:06):
brother Ju Yoxen took the throne and immediately fired Way,
who then committed suicide about it, to a small spattering
of applause. Chu Yohen then did that Hulk Hogan thing
where he cupped his ear to hear and encourage the
applause of the masses while running back and forth across
the palace balcony. But it was a little late for

(45:27):
all of that. Imagine being leader of a country and
the church itself comes out and says that you are
such a bag of shit that God himself tried to
smote or smoke you but missed. In less than twenty years,
Beijing would fall to rebel forces led by lie Zi
sheng Manchu armies would seize Beijing and Bingo Bengo. The

(45:51):
Ming dynasty, two hundred and seventy six years in the making,
was undone, and now the shelves were filling up with
Qing dynasty. This disaster basically answers the question what if
Chernobyl exploded? But in sixteen twenty six and in its
wake changes were made. No more storing and producing this

(46:13):
stuff in one space for crying out loud, and Beijing's
remaining powder depots were separated into smaller magazines and then
moved far outside of the city walls. As time went on,
the crater was gradually filled, the land was redeveloped, and
the whole thing was basically forgotten except by the ghosts.

(46:34):
The Wangancheng Armory site sat near today's Sisa area, roughly
between present day Shishin Manai Street and North Shenwa Street.
Today it's just a typical cityscape of residential and commercial buildings.
You would have no idea that anything ever happened there.
Many say the death toll was over twenty thousand, with

(46:57):
some claiming the number closer to thirty thousand, and with
no fire brigades or modern hospitals and no mass casualty plans,
secondary deaths from injuries, infection, and starvation would have been staggering.
But will never know exactly how many died because in
an explosion that large, people just had a way of

(47:17):
disappearing scarily enough, this can't even be ranked amongst the
worst disasters in Chinese history by death toll because across
history there have been famines and floods and tectonic disasters
that ended up claiming even more victims, but none of
them in one catastrophic pop. As the secrets of gunpowder

(47:39):
eventually left China, Europe and other areas of the world
would go on to suffer their own gunpowder magazine disasters
over the next couple of hundred years. And oddly that
makes me think that armory explosions are also a Chinese
invention just as much as the explosives that cause them.
I set off the top that when you check a

(48:00):
story from four hundred years ago, it's gotta be good
or bad depending. This event, sometimes called the Heavenly Fire
of Beijing, sits nicely on the list of the largest
non nuclear explosions in history. The Wangancheg explosion of sixteen
twenty six was one of the earliest urban technological disasters

(48:23):
ever recorded, and more than that, it was also the
largest pre industrial explosion in Chinese history. But I remember
it as quite possibly the most devastating accident based explosive
non natural disasters of all time. That is a pretty

(48:52):
big boast for a story, and there's really something about
the almost oxymoronic mundanity of the biggest explosion in history
being caused by someone shuffling slippers across a carpet. That
is just mind boggling. People said black powder was the
stolen fire that Heaven took back. All I know is

(49:12):
it became one of those creations that turned against its makers,
like the inventor of the segue writing his creation off
a cliff, but a million times worse. Whatever the story,
this one single explosion changed the course of history for
a civilization that has spanned almost five thousand years. Whatever
the story, this one single explosion changed the course of

(49:36):
history for a civilization that has spanned almost five thousand years.
And I look forward to doing more of these deep
history disasters in the future. I find them fascinating and
they're just hard to research because record keeping hasn't always
been great and explosions on this kind of scale have
a way of obliterating valuable storytelling evidence. Still, the people

(50:00):
of China thank you for having us, and we will
be back. And if you like what you heard today
and you have the means to magic erase a few
bucks from your bank account each month, why not consider
becoming a supporter of the show at patreon dot com.
Slash Funeral Kazoo add free episodes, extra content, all the

(50:21):
good stuff, all available all the time, and someone wrote
to ask if I could control the volume of my
episodes to make them not so jarring when the commercial
breaks come in. I have no idea how to gauge
the commercial breaks. I got zero control over them, and
I sincerely, sincerely apologize. In a perfect world, I really
just want to give this show away for free. I

(50:43):
just can't afford to do that. Yet, donations from people
like you are the only reason that I've even been
able to do this show as often as I have
for almost six years now. And if you don't know
Patreon or you don't trust it, it's really not a
big deal. Most of my supporters just sign up, make
a small monthly donation to sustain the show, and then,

(51:03):
just like the people of Beijing, they just disappear. And
failing that, you can always just visit, buy me a coffee,
dot com slash doomsday and show you support there with
a one time donation, like Kla Clark just did. Thankskla,
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(51:25):
out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as doomsday Podcast,
or just fire me an email to doomsdaypod at gmail
dot com. And i haven't had to say this in
a long time, but I've been working quite a bit,
so I'm a little late on checking emails, so bear
with me, and I apologize to anyone who has been
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(51:48):
you found this one, and while you're there, please leave
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But I always also say, if you could spare the
money and had to choose, I ask you to consider
making a donation to Global Menic. Global Medic is a

(52:10):
rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the
world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises.
They're often the first and sometimes the only team to
get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and
to date they have helped over six million people across
eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate

(52:34):
at Globalmenic dot ca. On On the next episode, we'll
be visiting the world's largest freshwater graveyard to hear the
tale of a ship so legendary that Gordon Lightfoot wrote
a six minute obituary about it. Set in d Minor.
We're not exactly sure what happened, but we do know

(52:56):
the lyrics. It's the Edmund Fitzgerald Disaster of nineteen seventy five.
We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.