The Tangshan earthquake became one of history's deadliest disasters

At 3:42 a.m. on July 28, 1976, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake tore through Tangshan, a densely populated industrial city in northeastern China. Striking from a shallow focal depth of about 15 kilometers, it caught the city’s million-plus residents asleep and flattened much of it within moments.

The human toll is staggering and still disputed. China’s official count records 242,000 deaths, but early estimates ran as high as 655,000, with hundreds of thousands more injured. The shaking reached intensity XI, near the top of the Chinese seismic scale, leaving almost nothing standing in the worst-hit districts.

Almost certainly, the exact number of dead will never be known.

By any tally, Tangshan ranks among the deadliest earthquakes in recorded history. The city was eventually rebuilt with support from across China, a recovery that became a grim symbol of resilience after one of the 20th century’s worst natural disasters.