Short answers, pulled from the story.
King Gustav III of Sweden issued the royal decree establishing Kuopio on the 17th of November 1775. This document made Kuopio the governmental seat for Savo-Karjala Province and transformed the small settlement into an administrative hub.
Lake Kallavesi surrounds the city on almost every side with a shoreline stretching 4,760 kilometers across municipal boundaries. More than half of the total area consists of water or forest land while ancient beaches sit up to 140 meters above current sea levels.
The population of Kuopio surpassed 100,000 when the town of Nilsiä joined the city in early 2013. This merger was part of a series of administrative consolidations that began in 1969 including Riistavesi joining in 1973 and Vehmersalmi in 2005.
The North Karelia Project began in the 1970s as a collaboration between the University of Kuopio and the World Health Organization to target public health issues. The project established Kuopio as a global hotspot for medical research and prevention studies where the University of Eastern Finland holds the biggest yearly enrollment rate of medical students in Finland.
Honeywell centralized its Finnish operations within Kuopio during the early 2000s while Junttan invested EUR 15 million into an assembly plant at Kylmämäki by late 2008. Retail investments included the Prisma hypermarket finished in December 2007 and the IKEA store opening in May 2013.