Talk:Wanggongchang Explosion

DYK Nomination (2015)

 * The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Created by Crusoe704 (talk). Self-nominated at 19:01, 20 December 2015 (UTC).


 * The above discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

References and extra info
I'll be the first to say that this page needs to be fleshed out, but it's difficult to find English-language sources for this topic or verify the reliability of the existing few. I would welcome it if one of our Chinese-speaking editors could look this over and add information from Chinese sources. Crusoe704 (talk) 18:53, 20 December 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Viztor (talk • contribs) 22:57, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
 * It is extremely difficult to find multiple sources for historical events. Most of those are in the imperial historian's records, at most with some anecdotal accounts that passed along though world of mouth.

The "10-20 kilotons of TNT" estimate seems wildly high, and definitely needs a citation. Compare for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brescia_explosion, which had similar effects with "only" 90 tons of black powder, which is about 50 tons of TNT equivalent. Yes, damage from an explosion does not scale linearly with explosion energy, but nothing in the descriptions seems to support an idea that this was 200-400 times as energetic an explosion as the Brescia explosion. (Also the comparison to Hiroshima is quite misleading since the Hiroshima bombing was an air burst, not a ground burst.) 2600:1700:DAA0:D591:E196:5643:9070:101E (talk) 03:24, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Here's one academic source.Mushroom Cloud Over the Northern Capital: Writing the Tianqi Explosion in the Seventeenth Century/ Doug Weller  talk 07:36, 8 February 2022 (UTC)