The 10,000 deaths at Qingyang are a story added about a century later: the 1490 court record does not have the event at all

Found 26 October 2026. Earliest dated account is the Ming History (1739, no deaths); the death tolls come from late-Ming books of marvels (about 1580-1606), with the month, the stone sizes and the toll all changing between them. The court's daily record for 1490 copies four of the other five portents later put in the Ming History, including a fireball the same month, but not this one. Yau et al. 1994 and Wikipedia already doubt the toll; we found no one who points to the Shilu's silence or to the mixed-up 'Shaanxi officials reported'. To do: check a proofread Shilu (Academia Sinica edition) and the 1557 Qingyang prefecture gazetteer, the likely source of the Ming History line.