Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pengcheng, meaning City of the Peng, derives from Dapeng, an ancient polity of the Shang dynasty that once dominated the region. The name appears in records as early as 573 BCE, when Pengcheng was a fortified Song city at the confluence of the Bian and Si rivers. Today it remains an alternate name for Xuzhou.
Japanese forces launched a large-scale pincer offensive toward Xuzhou on the 7th of April 1938 and entered the city from the west on the 19th of May. About 700 civilians were killed in a single bombing raid on the 14th of May. A U.S. diplomatic report cited missionary A. A. McFadyen characterizing the military's conduct as a duplicate of the occupation of Nanking.
Xuzhou is the ancestral home of the Han dynasty imperial family. In 202 BCE it became the capital of the Chu Princedom under Liu Jiao, a brother of the Han founder. Han-era royal tombs at sites including Shizishan contain gold-threaded jade burial suits, and the city hosts the earliest recorded Buddhist community in China, which emerged during the Eastern Han period.
Resource depletion since the 2000s led to the closure of most local mines, consolidating the sector under three major entities. Subsidence pits from intensive mining were converted into artificial wetlands including Jiuli Lake and Pan'an Lake. GCL Silicon established polysilicon production in Xuzhou in 2006, and BYD began building a 30 GWh sodium-ion battery plant there in 2024.
Xuzhou's GDP reached 890.04 billion RMB in 2023, with a per capita GDP of 98,683 RMB, roughly US$14,000. Among the member cities of the Huaihai Economic Zone, Xuzhou recorded the highest GDP, highest per capita GDP, and highest total retail sales at 444.51 billion RMB.
Records document 59 levee breaches near Xuzhou between 1550 and 1855 alone. The city sits on low-lying terrain at the transition between the Yellow River's alluvial fan and the Huai River basin, with the abandoned Yellow River course now elevated above the surrounding plain and acting as a drainage divide. A single flood in 1624 buried the walled city under four meters of water and sediment.