Taierzhuang

Taierzhuang is the southernmost of Zaozhuang's five districts, on the line where Shandong meets Jiangsu, covering 538.5 square kilometres with 305,102 residents at the 2020 census. Its position is its argument: it straddles the throat of the Grand Canal and has always been called the gateway to Xuzhou. The canal runs 42 kilometres across the district and stays open all year to ships of 2,000 tons, and three kilometres of Ming and Qing canal survive in the old town, which the World Tourism Organization has called a living canal. The town's other life came in the spring of 1938, when Nationalist armies fought Japanese troops here and drove them back. The battlefield site has been a national monument since 2006, and the old town has since been rebuilt into the largest ancient city in China.