[8] Its discovery was reported and announced by Gábor Marton, Csaba Kiss, and Thomas Müller at the 48th Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences on 17 October 2016.

[3][1] The satellite is named after Xiangliu, a nine-headed venomous snake monster in Chinese mythology that attended the water god Gonggong as his chief minister.

[6] It may have also resulted from the Kozai mechanism, driven by perturbations either from the Sun's tidal forces, or from higher order terms in the gravitational potential of Gonggong due to its oblate shape.

[13] In order for Xiangliu's orbit to remain eccentric over a timescale comparable to the age of the Solar System, it must be less than 100 km (60 mi) in diameter, corresponding to an albedo greater than 0.2.

[6] The satellite is named after Xiangliu, the nine-headed venomous snake monster and minister of the water god Gonggong in Chinese mythology.

[16] The names of Gonggong and Xiangliu were approved by the International Astronomical Union's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature and were simultaneously announced by the Minor Planet Center on 5 February 2020.