Today marks the 40th anniversary of the catastrophic Tangshan earthquake, in North China. Memorials are being held for the victims. The quake was one of the deadliest of the 20th Century.

A bunch of flowers are set in front of a memorial wall carved with names of 240,000 victims who died in a devastating earthquake in Tangshan, Hebei Province forty years ago. The 7.8-magnitude quake jolted the city on July 28, 1976 and left over 240,000 people dead and more than 160,000 injured. A memorial park consisting of a wall, a pool, woods, a square and two museums was built in 2008 to commemorate the disaster. [Photo: CRI Online]

It destroyed the industrial city in North China’s Hebei province, some 150 kilometers to the southwest of Beijing. The magnitude-7.8 quake, which the U.S. measured as magnitude-8.2, shook Tangshan at 3.42 am on July 28, 1976. Most people were asleep and had no chance to escape.

The force of the quake was equal to that of 400 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Most houses and buildings collapsed, burying more than 800,000 people. The final death toll was more than 242,000, with 160,000 people seriously injured.