Zaozhuang

The name Zaozhuang means 'date tree manor' — a reference to the jujube orchards that covered the southern Shandong plain before the coal industry arrived. Coal arrived in 1882, when Zhang Liangkun and his partners founded the Zhongxing Coal Mining Company, one of the first large-scale modern coal enterprises in China. Zhongxing operated with Chinese capital and Qing Dynasty patronage through a period when most modern industry in China was foreign-controlled; it became one of the templates for Chinese-managed industrial enterprise in the late imperial and early Republican periods.

In April 1938, the Battle of Taierzhuang was fought on the plain just east of Zaozhuang. Chinese Nationalist forces under General Li Zongren encircled and defeated two divisions of the Japanese Imperial Army over ten days of urban combat, inflicting heavy casualties and forcing a Japanese withdrawal. It was one of the first significant Chinese victories of the Second Sino-Japanese War — a result with strategic importance beyond the tactical outcome, demonstrating that Japanese forces could be decisively defeated in set-piece engagements. The reconstructed battlefield at Taierzhuang is now preserved as one of China's major Second World War historical sites.

Zaozhuang's coal seams, worked intensively for over a century, are now largely exhausted. The Chinese government has classified it as a 'resource-exhausted city' — a policy category that entitles it to transition subsidies and industrial restructuring support. The lesson is structural: a city built entirely around extraction of a finite resource has no natural transition mechanism. The infrastructure, the workforce skills, the supply chains, the institutions — all optimised for one material. When that material is gone, the city must be deliberately rebuilt rather than organically repurposed.

A termite mound is built entirely in service of resource extraction and processing. The colony builds tunnel systems to reach cellulose-rich material, farms fungal gardens to break it down beyond what unassisted digestion could achieve, and maintains precise humidity and temperature to support the fungal metabolism. The mound is a product of the extraction process — material moved, processed, and restructured. When the accessible resource is exhausted near a mound, the colony extends its tunnels or eventually abandons the site. Zaozhuang's century of coal infrastructure — the shafts, processing plants, rail connections, and worker settlements — is the mound. The coal seams are the cellulose. The city is now deciding what to build next.