Ming artillerymen using cannons to defend the Great Wall against the Manchus. Pinterest
The Ming Authorities Invited Disaster in the Heart of the Imperial Capital
Gunpowder’s and cannons’ importance had grown in recent years, as Ming armies found themselves in an arms race with the Manchus of today’s Manchuria. Cannons and an ample supply of gunpowder were necessary in order to keep the Manchus out of China. To keep them from falling into enemy hands, those factories were built in Beijing, protected by the capital’s thick and powerful walls. Much thought had gone into using the city to protect the gunpowder factories. However, little thought seems to have gone into protecting the city from the gunpowder factories in case of mishap.
Sometime around 10 AM on the morning of May 30th, 1626, people in Beijing noticed that there was a plume of smoke above the Wanggongchang Armory. It was followed soon thereafter by an immense explosion. Witnesses over a mile away heard a loud roar and rumble headed their way. It was followed by a giant dust cloud and tremors that shook houses. Then came a flash of light, followed by an enormous bang that “shattered the sky and crumbled the earth“. As seen below, the disaster shocked not just the city of Beijing, but produced aftershocks that changed China’s history.
The Wanggongchang explosion devastated Beijing. Samim
An Industrial Disaster With Far-Reaching Consequences
Huge trees were uprooted in the Wanggongchang disaster, and flew into the air to land on the other side of Beijing. A three-ton stone lion sailed over the city walls. All that was left of the armory was a crater 21 feet deep, and all within one and a half square miles was obliterated. The streets were reduced to jumbles of debris and rubble, littered with bodies and body parts. The Tianqi Emperor barely escaped with his life, while the only guard who stayed by his side amidst the panic was killed by a falling tile. The seven-month-old Crown Prince Zhu Cijong, the emperor’s only heir, died from the blast’s shock. The Great Tianqi Explosion was a disaster whose consequences went far beyond the immediate devastation and loss of life, terrible as those were.
The Wanggongchang Armory was one of China’s biggest weapons factories, and held the country’s biggest arms and munitions stockpile. The Ming military, already under pressure from the Manchus, never recovered. The disaster came at a time when the Ming Dynasty was also struggling with domestic crises caused by widespread corruption, internal conflicts, and a series of natural calamities that triggered peasant rebellions. The dramatic Tianqi Explosion eclipsed those. In a superstitious era, it was seen as a sign of Heaven’s displeasure with the ruling Mings, and a punishment from above for the emperor’s incompetence. All those factors came together to speed up the Ming decline and cause the dynasty’s collapse just 18 years later, when it was defeated and replaced by the Manchu, or Qing Dynasty.
British soldiers seizing an Afghan fortress during their occupation of Afghanistan. Wikimedia
Prelude to an Imperial Disaster in Afghanistan
For much of the nineteenth century, the British and Russians jockeyed for influence in Central Asia. The Russians pursued their version of “Manifest Destiny”, and expanded into the region. The British feared that the Russians coveted India, and sought to keep Tsarist borders as far away as possible from Britain’s most prized imperial possession. In the 1830s, an Afghan ruler became too friendly with Russia for Britain’s tastes. So the British invaded Afghanistan in 1839, and deposed its Russophile ruler. They replaced him in Kabul with a British puppet, and garrisoned the Afghan capital and key cities to keep their new pet ruler in power.
Things initially went well for the British. They made themselves comfortable in Afghanistan, and it seemed only a matter of time before the country was annexed to India. However, the Afghans proved obstreperous, and Britain’s puppet couldn’t control the country. By 1841, discontent had flared into open revolt as the Afghan tribes rebelled against the British and their pet ruler. As the countryside was lost and supply lines to India were cut off, British control shrank to the garrisoned cities. Soon, the British found themselves in control of little more than the grounds of their fortified garrisons.
The British Army in Afghanistan. Encyclopedia Britannica
Escape From Afghanistan
The British sought a face-saving measure to extricate themselves from what had become an untenable situation in Afghanistan. They removed their puppet ruler, and dusted off the ruler they had deposed in 1839. They reinstalled the old ruler, in exchange for his promise to control the Afghan tribes long enough for the British to evacuate Afghanistan and withdraw in peace. Whether the reinstalled ruler deliberately betrayed the British, or simply lacked the influence to control the tribesmen, things went sour. As snow fell, the British set out from Kabul on January 6th, 1842. Their column of 16,500 soldiers and civilians was barely a mile beyond the city before it began to take sniper fire from nearby hills.
By that first day’s end, emboldened parties of Afghan tribesmen had begun to dash in and out of the column to loot the supply train and butcher whoever they could lay their hands on. That night, many froze to death as the column encamped in the open without tents. The following day, some Afghan leaders arrived and demanded that the British halt while they tried to ensure the safety of the route ahead. They requested a large sum of money, negotiated a British agreement to withdraw immediately from all of Afghanistan, and demanded that they be given officers as hostages. The British agreed to those extortionate demands. As seen below, it did not save them from disaster.
The day after they struck a deal with the Afghans to let them go in peace, the British resumed their march from Kabul. By then, many of the soldiers had become too debilitated by the cold to fight. As they entered a narrow pass, the column was fired upon by tribesmen ensconced on the rocks above, and suffered 3000 casualties. Over the following days, the British were shaken down for more money and more hostages in exchange for empty promises to rein in the tribesmen. On January 11th, the British commander and his deputy were forced to surrender in exchange for yet another promise of safe passage.
Remnants of an Army’, by Elizabeth Butler, depicting the arrival at Jalalabad on January 13th, 1842, of Dr. William Brydon, the sole survivor of the British retreat from Kabul. Art Fix Daily
Soon thereafter, the British found their path barred, this time for good, by entrenched Afghans who had blocked and fortified a pass. A desperate charge was made to try and break through, but it was beaten back. On January 13th, a week after they had set out from Kabul, the last group of survivors formed a tiny square and made a last stand. They were wiped out. Later that afternoon, British sentries in Jellalabad, on the lookout for the arrival of the Kabul garrison, saw a single rider approaching. It was a Dr. Brydon, the sole survivor of the British retreat from Kabul.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
