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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

Another major explosion theorized to be caused by bolides is the 1626 Wanggongchang Explosion[1] in Beijing which is considered one of the major causes of the fall of the Chinese Ming dynasty.

Although having its epicenter in the middle of a gunpowder factory would of course also heavily imply a gunpowder explosion (or maybe both).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion

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This seems like the most obvious candidate for Occam's Razor, although stranger things have happened.

Part of me wonders if it's easier to 'invent' a comet strike or otherwise imply divine intervention as a way of avoiding blame for putting a gunpowder factory in the middle of a city.

In the political context of 17th century China (and many premodern polities), it's much preferable to blame a scapegoat official for putting a factory in the wrong place than to blame divine intervention.

The former means the government executes a couple of people. The latter meant to most people that the government has lost 'the Mandate of Heaven' and is ready to be overthrown. That's extremely bad news to the government.

Alternatively, the story about a comet strike may have been invented/popularized by the next (the Qing) dynasty to further legitimize their power. It's not preferable to the Ming to blame divine intervention, but it would be preferable to the Qing.

Given the transportation options at the time, is that really the wrong place for such a factory? Clearly the factory exploding was bad, but without trains or trucks to move large amounts of processed material around, wouldn't in the middle of the city, dangerous as it was, be the best place to have the resources from which to be able to mount a defense from outside invaders?

It would be different with trains/cars, but before then?

What a twisted logic they had back then. City got destroyed because of an incompetent government? That's fine, we can keep trusting them. City got destroyed by a meteorite? No way we can ever trust them again, they've lost the Mandate of Heaven!

In practice I would assume though that people weren't much different than today, and the Mandate of Heaven trick would only work if the government doesn't appear to be too incompetent.

Obviously, things have changed a bit, but we aren't that much better at judging what leaders are actually responsible for. The global economy is so big that in most circumstances it could be modeled as a purely natural force that can be at best managed, like weather, but American presidents can lose reelection as if they are personally responsible for economic performance. There's not that much evidence that a president, who has been in power for maybe a couple of years, could have more than a marginal impact on the trajectory of the economy in most circumstances. But we act like they do.

That's because your causation is very different from many past peoples. They viewed reality as very affected by divine forces and the 'natural' event as divine intervention (directly or indirectly).

City got destroyed by a meteorite? You view this as an accident. They think 'better remove whatever made the Heavens upset before we are smote again and again with meteorites or worse'.

Now, since the government controlled just about everything in theory (few limits on power), the government is held responsible. People start spreading the notion that perhaps the government needs to be altered to people more pleasing to Heaven, and from there we get civil wars, rebellions, etc. Which can lead to more disasters (badly maintained dams for example, because the civil war takes too many resources away from maintenance) and so on. It's a cycle of instability every ancient government wanted to avoid.

The Mandate of Heaven is not that weird, we place similar levels of trust on Market Forces and such things, we're not so different.

To be fair, the Mandate of Heaven was often judged in practice based on (somewhat) preventable disasters. E.g. in case of famine, it was supposed to be the duty of the government to maintain sufficient supplies in good times to remedy it. So the connection between bad governance and loss of the Mandate was generally more direct than in this example.

Ok my comment was semi ironic and didn't think anyone would care much about it. I did acknowledge that things probably aren't that different today.

>What a twisted logic they had back then. City got destroyed because of an incompetent government? That's fine, we can keep trusting them

Back then?

For how many years now have democrats been promising to be the savior of inner city minorities? And when are republicans going to get around to getting the government out of people's business?

Humans have changed very little over time.

A comet strike, which is surely divine intervention, would imply they lost the Mandate of Heaven, I would think. So I think two different ways of saying the same thing.

You need lots of gunpowder inside the city in case you are attacked, so you need an armory inside the city.

Adding a factory doesn’t seem to add that much risk to me. It can be cordoned of in a building with strong walls and light-weight ceilings. That directs any force of an accidental explosion upwards.

The armory, on the other hand, needs protection against incoming projectiles. That calls for strong ceilings.

I don’t believe “gun”powder was used in weaponry in the Ming era.

Your logic is sensible but is not for this specific example.

I don’t know whether it did, but Wikipedia thinks it was used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion:

“The epicenter was a major production center of gunpowder

[…]

a military storage facility that "dispatches 3000 catties (about 1.8 metric tons) of gunpowder every five days"”

This was 400 years ago, about 800 years after the invention of gunpowder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#China) and about 600 after the first primitive guns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun#History)

Learn something new every day. Thanks!

While I am by no means a historian, wouldn't a "comet strike" in a gunpowder factory be a great way for the Mings to loose the mandate of heaven? Perhaps there's a political angle we should consider on this occasion as well

Bolides will very rarely hit a city precisely, especially in the periods where cities were small and not sprawling. Moreover, they usually fly tangentially and cover a huge area (such as, Chelyabinsk meteor was also seen from Yekaterinburg, 200 km away).

There should be a lot of evidence towards it before it to be accepted as the primary cause (and not an omen, for example)

This isn't unusual. In 2009 I was sitting in my hot tub in Montana and saw this event, which hit in Utah, 500 miles away : https://www.nevadameteorites.com/nevadameteorites/November_1...

Thing is, it did not obliterate any specific area with 25 km radius.

No, high altitude burst.

Interesting! How do you know that this was a meteorite and not another thing that went wrong at Dugway?

I could discern the rough trajectory, which was inbound towards the target. So unless they were under alien attack it had to be a meteor.

In reality it could be both: meteor-flinging aliens.

The suggestion in the article is that the bolide impact (or airburst) was well outside the city, to the SW, since a lot of the evidence suggests a blast moving from SW to NE through the city.

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