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Historic Disasters That Were Way Worse Than People Think

Khalid Elhassan April 6, 2020 33 min

Yellow River - 1887 Yellow River flood — 1887 Yellow River Flood. Hakai Magazine

14. “Stones Fell Like Rain”

Trees knocked over by the 1908 Tunguska Event. Geocosmic Rex

Contemporary Chinese records described the 1490 Meteor Shower: “Stones fell like rain in the Ch’ing-yang district. The larger ones were [about 3.5 pounds], and the smaller ones were [about 2 pounds]. Numerous stones rained in Ch’ing-yang. Their sizes were all different. The larger ones were like goose’s eggs and the smaller ones were like water chestnuts. More than 10,000 people were struck dead. All of the people in the city fled to other places.“

There are similarities between Chinese source descriptions of the 1490 event and what is known of the 1908 Tunguska Event. In 1908, an air burst of a meteoroid at an altitude of five miles above a sparsely populated part of Siberia flattened 770 square miles of forest. So it is probable that the 1490 Ch’ing Yang meteor shower was also caused by the disintegration of an asteroid in an air burst during atmospheric entry.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.