As days go, January 23 1556 was a proper stinker. According to most accounts, this fateful date saw more human lives extinguished than any other day in history, with the vast majority of these deaths occurring in the Shaanxi province of northwest China.
The culprit on this occasion was an enormous earthquake caused by the slipping of both the Weinan and Huashan faults. With its epicenter close to the city of Huaxian, the tremor is estimated to have claimed the lives of 830,000 people.
Of course, no one knows the exact death toll or how many individuals expired on the actual day of the disaster. According to some records, around one-third of victims were killed by falling buildings, collapsing cave dwellings, and landslides in the immediate aftermath of the quake, with the rest succumbing to disease and famine in the weeks that followed.
With a magnitude of between 8 and 8.3, the infamous Shaanxi earthquake was far from the strongest quake our species has had to endure, but tops the list of the deadliest disasters of this kind in human history. The second most lethal earthquake occurred in 1976, also in China, and ended the lives of around 655,000 people.
Considering the global population in 1556 was still less than half a billion, though, the Shaanxi death toll almost certainly represents the greatest relative loss of human life in a single day. It may well also hold the record for the highest absolute number of deaths, although it’s hard to say with certainty which date has seen the highest loss of life.
After all, with more than 8 billion of us currently inhabiting the planet, an average of around 170,000 people reach the end of their lives every day. Dates that witness extreme tragedies are therefore likely to be marked by a large number of deaths above this already considerable background level.
For reference, the single deadliest day of warfare is believed to have occurred on the night of March 9 to 10, 1945, when a US bombing raid called Operation Meetinghouse killed 100,000 people in Tokyo. By comparison, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year are reported to have claimed around 66,000 and 39,000 lives respectively.
The Yangtze-Huai River floods of 1931, meanwhile, are often cited as the biggest natural disaster in history. As with many events of this nature, the total death toll is highly disputed, although some estimates suggest that more than 2 million people may have died across central and eastern China over a four-month period.
Almost half a millennium on from the Shaanxi earthquake, though, the world is yet to witness another single day as deadly as that miserable Thursday in January.
