Zaozhuang spent most of the 20th century as a coal city — one of the major mining centers of southern Shandong — and it carries that industrial history visibly. The mines have largely been exhausted or closed, and the city is in the middle of the transition that post-coal Chinese cities have been navigating for two decades: tourism, heritage, wetlands. It has made more progress than most, largely because it holds two genuinely distinctive attractions within its administrative boundaries.
The first is Taierzhuang, a canal town 30 kilometers to the southeast that has been reconstructed as a heritage district around the site of the 1938 battle where Chinese forces won their first significant ground victory over Japan. The reconstruction is extensive — two square kilometers of canal-side architecture in eight regional styles — and the battle memorial hall is one of the more serious war museums in eastern China. Taierzhuang draws the majority of Zaozhuang's tourist visitors and is worth a half-day on its own terms.
The second is Weishan Lake, a large shallow wetland to the northwest that is one of the biggest lotus-growing areas in China. In July and August the lake is covered in flowering lotus for considerable distances, a spectacle that is dramatic enough to attract significant numbers of domestic visitors even from cities as far as Jinan. The wetland also supports a fishing community whose lifestyle on the water has some continuity with the canal culture that once defined this part of southern Shandong. Zaozhuang also claims Lu Ban, the legendary craftsman-inventor of the Spring and Autumn period, as a native son.