Wanggongchang Explosion

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The Wanggongchang Explosion (

Several government officials in the city were killed, injured or went missing during the explosion, and some were reportedly buried alive in their own homes. The Minister of Works, Dong Kewei (董可威), broke both arms and later had to retire from politics completely. The palaces in the Forbidden City were under renovation at the time, and over 2,000 workers were shaken off the roof and fell to their deaths. The Tianqi Emperor himself was having breakfast in Qianqing Palace when the explosion occurred. After the initial quake most of the palace servants panicked, so the Emperor started running to the Hall of Union, followed only by a single guard who remained calm but was later killed by a falling tile. The Tianqi Emperor's only remaining heir, the 7-month-old Crown Prince Zhu Cijiong (朱慈炅), died from the shock.^[2]

Aftermath

The late Ming dynasty was already suffering domestic crisis from political corruption, factional conflicts, and repeated natural disasters (alleged by some historians to be due to the Little Ice Age) leading to peasant riots and rebellions, which also happened elsewhere globally as part of the General Crisis. However, the horror of the Wanggongchang Explosion dwarfed all of those, and the imperial courts criticized the Tianqi Emperor and believed that the incident was a punishment from Heaven as a warning to correct the sins of the emperor's personal incompetence. Tianqi Emperor was forced to publicly announce a repenting edict, and issued 20,000 taels of gold for the rescue and relief effort.

Sociopolitical impact

The Wanggong Armory Explosion can be considered a pivotal event in

Due to the epicenter of the disaster, the Wanggongchang Armory, being a military storage facility that "dispatches 3000 catties (about 1.8 metric tons) of gunpowder every five days",^{[This quote needs a citation]} an accidental gunpowder ignition was blamed as the culprit from the very beginning. The cause has been suspected to be poor handling during manufacturing and transport, electrostatic discharges or even sabotage by Later Jin spies, and is sometimes cited as proof of the decline in the Ming government's administrative quality.

See also

• 2015 Tianjin explosions
• Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions
• List of explosions

References