Historical records and inscriptions typically asserted one of the three numbers to be the death toll: 170,000, 200,000+ and 270,000. In
Taiyuan and
Pingyang, nearly 100,000 houses collapsed and over 200,000 people died from collapsing buildings and
loess caves in a similar manner to the situation that would be experienced 253 years later in the
1556 Shaanxi earthquake. Cracks in the ground turned into miniature rivers, and many canals in Shanxi Province were destroyed, along with city walls. Some reports stated that the earthquake even levelled mountains and hills, altering the topographic make-up of the region. Rebuilding was generally slow, owing to the destroyed infrastructure of Shanxi and was interrupted by several other earthquakes in the following years. The 1303 Hongdong earthquake, though currently the last to have occurred on its fault system, marked the start of a centuries-long episode of heightened earthquake activity throughout China, the first of several to occur up to the end of the twentieth century. It was also the first of many examples of earthquakes that demonstrated the tendency of earthquakes in China to strike near loess plateaus. == See also ==