The bomb uners a gripping true story of espionage at the core of the British

American atomic research programs. Find out more in season two of the bomb, a

podcast from the BBC World Service available now.

Hello and thank you for downloading this edition of the Witness History

podcast from the BBC World Service. Forty-six years ago on the 28th of July 1976,

one of the deadliest earthquakes in modern history hit the city of Tang Shan in

Northeastern China. It measured a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale and

killed hundreds of thousands of people in the city and surrounding areas.

Lucy Burns spoke to eyewitness Yusuyun in 2016.

The earthquake weak me from a deep sleep. At that moment I didn't realize it was

in the earthquake. I thought it was really a bad storm, so I went to try and close

the window. No sooner had I cut the window, the war collapsed.

Yusuyun was 15 years old and lived in Tang Shan with her parents and four sisters.

I heard my mother shout it first quick, first quick. We crowd out of the ruins of our home

into the ring outside. I was wearing only underwear at the time. When I looked

wrong, I could see my entire neighborhood was completely flattened. The only

thing standing were the two trees in front of our house. This was the only way we could

recognize where our house had been. Tang Shan is an industrial city in Hebei Province in

Northeastern China, about 200 kilometers from Beijing. It was an area prone to earthquakes

and so residents like Yusuyun's father had developed a homemade warning system

using a bottle balanced on a metal bowl. The idea being that if there was an earthquake,

a tumor would make bottle four, making a big noise on the metal bowl and we could

...