The armory sat about three kilometers southwest of the Forbidden City, normally staffed by 70 to 80 workers and dispatching roughly 1.8 metric tons of gunpowder every five days. When it detonated, the blast obliterated everything within a two-kilometer radius -- an area of about four square kilometers. Streets became unrecognizable, buried under fragments and roof tiles. The force uprooted large trees and flung them across the city as far as rural Miyun, on Beijing's opposite side. A stone lion weighing approximately three metric tons was thrown clear over the city wall. The blast was heard in Tongzhou to the east, and tremors were felt over 150 kilometers away in cities including Tianjin, Datong, and Xuanhua. At the epicenter, the ground sank more than six meters.

Emperor Tianqi was eating breakfast in Qianqing Palace when the explosion struck. As the walls shook, his servants panicked and scattered. The emperor bolted toward the Hall of Union, followed by a single guard -- the only attendant who kept his composure. That guard was later killed by a falling roof tile. Across the Forbidden City, over 2,000 workers who had been renovating palace rooftops were shaken loose and fell to their deaths. The Minister of Works, Dong Kewei, broke both arms and was forced into permanent retirement. Most devastatingly, the emperor's only remaining heir, seven-month-old Crown Prince Zhu Cijiong, died from the shock of the blast.

Witnesses reported strange formations in the sky above the epicenter: some clouds resembled tangled strands of silk, others were multicolored, and some 'looked like a black lingzhi mushroom' -- an uncanny anticipation of the mushroom cloud descriptions that would not enter common vocabulary for another three centuries. Equally puzzling was what the explosion did not produce: fire. Despite the enormous destructive force, contemporary accounts note a striking absence of fire damage in the blast zone. This anomaly has fueled centuries of debate. Hypotheses range from straightforward gunpowder ignition to a meteor air burst, natural gas explosion, or even a volcanic event. No academic consensus has been reached, and the incident predated modern scientific investigation in China by centuries.

The death of Crown Prince Zhu Cijiong removed a stabilizing element from the Ming court at the worst possible moment. The Tianqi Emperor himself would die just a year later, and the factional warfare between the Donglin movement and their rivals intensified under his successor, the Chongzhen Emperor. Chongzhen's impatience and rash decision-making, compounded by the political chaos, accelerated the dynasty's decline. Eighteen years after the explosion, the Ming fell. The Wanggongchang disaster did not cause the collapse of a 276-year-old dynasty -- but it killed the heir, rattled the court, and deepened the fractures that Li Zicheng's rebellion would soon exploit. The blast crater has long since been built over, leaving no visible trace in modern Beijing. The explosion endures only in the historical record -- and in the questions it still refuses to answer.