Tangshan

It struck at nineteen minutes to four in the morning, directly beneath a city of a million people. Almost nobody was awake and almost nothing had been built to withstand it.

Eighty-five per cent of the buildings came down in twenty-three seconds. The official figure is two hundred and forty-two thousand seven hundred and sixty-nine killed; other estimates run to three times that.

For years the scale was not admitted and foreign help was refused. The survivors dug with their hands for their own families first and then for the neighbours.