Earthquakes in China: Live Map & the Deadliest Quake Ever

China is one of the most seismically active and populous countries on Earth, crossed by dozens of active fault systems generated by the collision of the Indian plate with Eurasia in the west and by crustal blocks grinding past each other across the North China Plain and Sichuan Basin in the east. That combination has produced both some of the deadliest and some of the most destructive earthquakes ever recorded.

The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake (estimated M~8.0) remains the deadliest earthquake in recorded human history, killing an estimated 830,000 people, many in collapsing cave-dwellings carved into soft loess cliffs. In the modern era, the 1976 Tangshan earthquake (M7.6) struck a sleeping industrial city with almost no warning and killed an officially confirmed 242,000 people, while the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (M7.9) killed roughly 87,000 people and destroyed thousands of schools, becoming the catalyst for stricter national building codes.

The China Earthquake Administration (CEA) operates the country's national seismic monitoring network, and hazard is highest along the Longmenshan Fault in Sichuan, the North China Plain near Beijing and Tangshan, and the Tian Shan and Tibetan Plateau margins in the west, where the Indian plate continues to push northward. Xinjiang and Yunnan provinces also see frequent moderate earthquakes tied to this ongoing continental collision, making seismic hazard a permanent feature of life across large parts of the country.