On the 23rd of March, 687 B.C., wrote Edouard Biot in his catalogue of the meteors which were observed in ancient China, the fixed stars were not visible but, "in the middle of the night stars fell like rain..."
...In this period falls a series of great natural upheavals that shook the world in the eighth century and climaxed in the cosmic catastrophe of March 23, 687. The reader of Worlds in Collision knows how this date is arrived at on the basis of material collected from countries as far apart as China, Judea, and Italy...