1755 Lisbon earthquake a benevolent deity. The Lisbon disaster provided a counterexample. As Theodor Adorno wrote, "[t]he earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz" ("Negative Dialectics" 361). In the later twentieth century, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe that transformed European culture and philosophy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also influenced by the devastation following the earthquake, whose severity he believed was due to too many people living within the close quarters of the city. Rousseau used the earthquake as an argument against cities as part of his desire for a more naturalistic
1556 Shaanxi earthquake and Gansu provinces and parts of others. Much of the population lived in dwellings called yaodongs in these cliffs. This was the major contributing factor to the very high death toll. The earthquake collapsed many caves and caused landslides, which destroyed many more. The cost of damage done by the earthquake is almost impossible to measure in modern terms. The death toll, however, has been traditionally given as 820,000 to 830,000. The accompanying property damage would have been incalculable – an entire region of inner China had been destroyed and an estimated 60% of the region’s population died. The Portuguese