In the days before the earthquake, residents of central Taiwan reported strange atmospheric phenomena they described as signs in the sky. Near the epicenter, in the town then known as Kiyomizu in Taichu Prefecture, now Qingshui District in modern Taichung, locals noticed something more immediate and unsettling: the water in ground wells began to boil roughly an hour before the shock. Whether these reports reflect genuine geophysical precursors or the retrospective sharpening of memory in the aftermath of disaster, they became woven into the oral history of the event, adding an eerie preamble to the destruction that followed at dawn.

The earthquake's epicenter lay in the mountains of what is now Sanyi Township in Miaoli County. The shaking was felt across nearly the entire island, from the northern tip to all but Hengchun at the southern extreme, and even across the Taiwan Strait in Fuzhou and Xiamen on the Chinese mainland. Soil liquefaction was observed in multiple locations. At Gabi Village, the two sides of the fault dropped a full three meters relative to each other. The heaviest damage concentrated in Shinchiku Prefecture and Taichu Prefecture, covering a 135-square-kilometer area that corresponds to modern Miaoli County and Taichung. Transportation, communications, and water infrastructure across the region were severely compromised.

The official damage figures tell the story in blunt arithmetic: 3,276 dead, 12,053 injured, 17,907 houses destroyed, 36,781 houses damaged. Behind those numbers were farming communities in the mountainous interior of Taiwan, people living in structures built to local standards that had never been tested against a magnitude 7.1 event. The aftershock at Gabi compounded the devastation, catching survivors of the initial shock in collapsing buildings already weakened by the first tremor. The earthquake exposed the vulnerability of an entire region's built environment, a vulnerability that had been invisible until the ground revealed it.

The scale of casualties forced the colonial Japanese government to act. In the earthquake's wake, officials implemented building codes comparable to those already in force in Japan, where seismic engineering had been advancing since the devastating 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Taiwan's construction standards were brought into alignment with Japanese practice, a reform driven not by policy ambition but by the sheer number of dead. The ruins of the Longteng Bridge in Sanyi, which collapsed during the earthquake, still stand today as a preserved monument. Their broken arches frame the valley they once spanned, a reminder that the deadliest earthquake in Taiwan's history also became the one that forced the island to build differently.