Caspian". Qazvin's importance as a commercial entrepôt was helped by the fact that it lay at a three-way crossroads: it connected Tehran, the new Qajar capital; Tabriz, "the second city of the empire", and the important Caspian port of Anzali. Qazvin was manufacturing velvets, brocades, and cotton cloth. In an 1841 report, the British diplomat Keith Edward Abbott wrote that Qazvin was commercially as important as Tehran. Mirza Husayn Farahani, who visited Qazvin in 1884, wrote that it was divided into 17 districts and had 600 shops, 8 caravanserais, 40 mosques, 9 madrasas, and 12 yakhchals. Its walls were in ruins but 12 gates were still standing. This increase in commercial importance does not seem to have been accompanied by an increase in population, although it's hard to tell for sure because contemporary estimates were not necessarily based on the same criteria. James Justinian Morier and William Ouseley in the early 1800s both gave an estimate of 25,000 people. The census taken from 1880 to 1882 gave a population of 64,362 for Qazvin. Farahani in 1884 wrote that Qazvin had 30,000 people in about 7,000 households. George Curzon wrote that Qazvin's population was said to be 40,000 in 1889, but he wrote that its actual population was probably no more than 2/3 of that. In the middle of the century, the Babi movement had one of its centers here and the first massacre of Babis occurred in Qazvin in 1847. In the second half of the 19th century Qazvin was one of the centers of Russian presence in northern Iran. A detachment of the Persian Cossack Brigade under Russian officers was stationed here. From 1893 this was the headquarters of the Russian Company for Road construction in Persia which connected Qazvin by roads to Tehran and Hamadan. The company built a hospital and the St. Nicolas Church. 20th century to present In 1920 Qazvin was used as a base for the British Norperforce. The 1921 Persian coup d'état that led to the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty was launched from Qazvin. During the reign of Reza Shah, Qazvin declined in importance as a commercial center as communications improved. Many merchants and other residents moved to Tehran. On September 1, 1962, an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale struck Qazvin, killing more than 12,000 people. The earthquake occurred shortly before Israeli Minister of Agriculture, Moshe Dayan, was scheduled to visit