Located on the southern bank of theYangtze River, Changzhou borders the provincial capital of Nanjing to the west, Zhenjiang to the northwest, Wuxi to the east, and the province of Zhejiang to the south.
The agglomeration is now part of the Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou metropolitan area which has now more than 36,000,000 inhabitants, only second in China after the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone
Today it is an important industrial center for textiles, food processing, engineering (diesel engines, generators, transformers and other machinery), and high technology.