Taierzhuang: Three Kilometres of Old Canal and a Fortnight of Street Fighting

Taierzhuang's wealth has always been the passage through it. The earliest canal known in Zaozhuang territory is the Qianyang Canal, dug in the Spring and Autumn period, and the section of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal through Zaozhuang was cut in 1604, running 93.9 kilometres through Taierzhuang, Yucheng, Xuecheng and Tengzhou, with the Wei River as its main source of supply. Three kilometres of Ming and Qing canal remain inside the town, crossed by the ring moat, and the whole district is now 30.6 per cent green. Because traffic converged here, merchants settled and mixed; the city's own record says that the gathering of merchants brought cultural blending and made the ancient town a typical representative of canal culture. The rebuilt old city now holds eleven functional divisions, eight scenic spots and twenty-nine attractions.

The battle ran from March to the middle of April 1938 as part of the Xuzhou Campaign. The Japanese 5th Division attacked Linyi to the north-east and the 10th Division came through Tengxian and Lincheng; both were thrown back. Taierzhuang sits thirty kilometres north-east of Xuzhou on the north bank of the canal, and the water decided the fighting: crossing the river was the Japanese intention, holding the crossing the Chinese one. Li Zongren, commanding the Fifth War Zone, committed the 2nd Group Army of Sun Lianzhong, while inside the walls Chi Fengcheng's 31st Division held on even after the army around it had lost seventy per cent of its strength. On 31 March the two commanders came to the outskirts. At one in the morning on 7 April the counter-attack began on both flanks and closed to bayonet fighting in the lanes; the Japanese withdrew towards Yicheng and Zaozhuang.

The two sides' own accounts do not agree on what the fortnight cost. The Nationalist official history puts some 46,000 Chinese troops in the battle with about 7,500 killed, wounded or missing. A modern reading of the Japanese Official Gazette gives 1,346 Japanese soldiers of the 5th and 10th Divisions killed in action between 20 February and 7 April 1938, of whom 188 men of the 5th Division and 448 of the 10th fell at Taierzhuang itself. The claim made in China at the time was more than 10,000 Japanese killed or wounded, and the Nationalist government's own propaganda directive of April 1938 told its press to report facts and guard against exaggeration. Even Li Zongren's verdict was modest: the victory was the first happy occasion since the war of resistance had started.