A light earthquake rattled Beijing overnight, waking residents and sending students rushing from their dorms as videos of shaking living rooms went viral on Chinese social media on Wednesday.
The 4.5-magnitude quake struck a suburb of the nearby port city of Tianjin at 01:21 a.m. local time at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
The China Earthquake Networks Center measured the quake at a magnitude of 4.2 and a depth of 20 kilometers (12.4 miles), placing the epicenter in Yongqing county in neighboring Hebei province.
The epicenter was only 13 kilometers from Beijing at the closest point, the Beijing Earthquake Agency said, with tremors felt strongly in some areas of the Chinese capital.
“It did not cause any structural damage to buildings in the city and will not impact the normal functioning of daily life or production,” the agency said in an statement. The quake would not influence seismic activity in the city, it added.
Beijing, a metropolis of 22 million people, has periodically been affected by tremors from earthquakes nearby. The Beijing plain is a seismically active area and home to more than a dozen seismic fault lines, including one that runs from the city’s Shunyi district in the northeast through downtown.
But for many residents, tremors strong enough to wake them in the middle of the night were a novel experience.
The quake was among the top trending topics on Chinese social media platforms on Wednesday, with many Beijingers posting videos of swaying ceiling lights and sharing their experiences of waking up to their bedrooms quivering.
“I made a quick judgment and decided not to run – because I didn’t feel any tremors, and my phone showed that both the magnitude of the epicenter and the level expected to reach Beijing were low,” she said.
Chirimiri Li, a university student in the capital, took no chances after being woken by a loud ring on her roommate’s cellphone. She said she initially thought the alarm was set for the wrong time and was about to ask her roommate to turn it off.
“That’s when I realized the slight shaking I had felt earlier wasn’t from staying up too late – it was actually an earthquake,” Li said.
“I immediately woke up the rest of our dorm and told everyone there was an earthquake. When we opened the door, we saw people already running outside, so we figured it’s better to be safe than sorry and ran out too. By then, the shaking had already stopped.”
The students stayed in an open area for about half an hour before the crowd gradually started to head back.
“I was a bit scared when I first told everyone about the earthquake, but once we all decided to run out together, we calmed down,” Li said, adding that the only other quake she remembered in Beijing was back when she was in kindergarten.
On Chinese social media, some noted that most users who shared their experiences of running outside were students.
“Nothing happened in my residential complex,” one comment said.
“Office workers have already become lazy and numb — wearing eye masks and earplugs to sleep, completely unaware of anything going on,” said another.