Construction of the Sacred Heart Cathedral began in 1908, commissioned as part of the Roman Catholic missionary presence in Jiangsu Province. The building was designed by Joseph Wu, a German Catholic clergyman who adapted Western ecclesiastical architecture to the Chinese context. The cathedral was completed in 1910, during the last years of the Qing dynasty, a period when foreign religious institutions were establishing themselves across China's interior cities. Xuzhou's position as a major rail junction made it accessible in ways that more remote cities were not, and the Catholic mission took root along the same transportation corridors that would later become battlefields.

The cathedral has weathered more than a century of turmoil. The fall of the Qing, the warlord era, the Japanese occupation of 1938, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution all swept through Xuzhou. That the cathedral still stands is itself remarkable. In November 1987, the Xuzhou Municipal Government designated it a municipal-level cultural unit, recognizing its architectural and historical significance. Renovations in 1992 restored elements that had deteriorated over the decades. In April 1995, the Jiangsu Provincial Government elevated its status to a provincial-level cultural heritage conservation unit, ensuring stronger legal protections for the structure.

Today the cathedral continues to serve as an active place of worship for Xuzhou's Catholic community, one of many religious minorities navigating the complex relationship between faith and state in contemporary China. Its location on Youth Road -- a name that reflects the revolutionary optimism of a later era -- places it in the commercial heart of the city, surrounded by modern buildings that dwarf it in scale but not in character. The cathedral's endurance through a century of war, revolution, and urban transformation speaks to the tenacity of the community that has maintained it, and to the curious way that the most fragile-seeming structures sometimes outlast the forces that threaten them.