recent discoveries have shown that it was more likely 7.9 Mw. While it was the deadliest earthquake and the third-deadliest natural disaster in history, there have been earthquakes with considerably higher magnitudes. Following the earthquake, aftershocks continued several times a month for half a year. In the annals of China it was described in this manner: The earthquake damaged many of the Forest of Stone steles badly. Of the 114 Kaicheng Stone Classics, 40 were broken in the earthquake. The scholar Qin Keda lived through the earthquake and recorded details. One conclusion he drew was that "at the very beginning of an earthquake, people indoors should not go out immediately. Just crouch down and wait. Even if the nest has collapsed, some eggs may remain intact." The shaking reduced the height of the Small Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an by three levels. Loess caves Millions of people at the time lived in yaodong—artificial loess caves—on high cliffs in the Loess Plateau. Loess is the silty soil, deposited on the plateau by windstorms over ages. The soft loess clay is a result of thousands of years of winds carrying silt from the Gobi Desert into the area. Loess is a highly erosion-prone soil. It is susceptible to the forces of wind and water. The Loess Plateau and its dusty soil cover almost all of Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces and parts of others. Much of the population lived in 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. Affected area More than 97 counties in the provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Gansu, Hebei, Shandong, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu and Anhui were affected. Buildings were damaged slightly in the cities of Beijing, Chengdu and Shanghai. An area was destroyed, and in some counties as much as 60% of the population was killed. The cost of damage done by the earthquake is almost impossible to measure in modern terms. Death toll Modern estimates put the direct deaths from the earthquake to be probably a little over 100,000, while 730,000 migrated away or died from famine and plagues, which summed up to a total loss of 830,000 people in Imperial records. It is one of the deadliest earthquakes in China, in turn making it one of the top disasters in China by death toll. Foreign reaction