Imperial Works by Emperor Kangshi
Emperor Kangshi was a diligent ruler in the Chinese history. He studied very hard when he was young and he achieved a lot in sciences. He appointed a Belgian priest as the minister in charge of astronomy. He learnt from him and he wrote dozens of articles concerning astronomy, geology and physics in his life. Such achievements rarely happened with other feudal emperors in ancient China.
After Kangshi succeeded the throne, a series of earthquakes happened in North China. Emperor Kangshi issued some imperial instructions to assuage the
people； in the meantime, he also studied the causes of earthquakes. In the year of 1792,just one year before his death, the 67-year-old Kangshi compiled an article named
“earthquake”, which was the crystallization of his experience of many great earthquakes in his whole life.
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Imperial Works by Emperor Kangshi |
In his essay, Kangshi believed that earthquakes come from underground. In earthquakes of similar scales, the deeper the origin of the shock was, the more places would be radiated by the shock, but the destructive force would be
less； if the origin of the shock was shallow, the less areas would be affected by it, but the destructive force would be more intense. His conclusion was quite close with the results of modern earthquake study.
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