Xanadau

Xanadu (pronounced zan-a-du)

Also known as Shangdu, Xanadu was the capital of Kublai Khan's (1215-1294) Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) in China, before he decided to move his throne to the Jin dynasty (1115-1234) capital of Zhōngdū (middle capital), which he renamed Khanbaliq, later known in the West as Peking and of late, Beijing.  Xanadu then became his summer capital.  Xanadu was visited by the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (circa 1254–1324) in about 1275, and was destroyed in 1369 by the Ming army under Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398).

Relic site of Xanadu.  Xanadu was located in what is now called Inner Mongolia, 220 miles (350 km) north of what is no the city of Beijing (Peking).  Today, only ruins remain, surrounded by a grassy mound that was once the city walls. Since 2002, restoration work has been undertaken and in June 2012, Shangdu was made a World Heritage Site.

Kubla Khan (1797) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

By his own account, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was reading about Shangdu while taking laudanum, an opium based medicine.  It led to an opium-induced dream, during which he composed some three-hundred lines of verse.  As soon as he awoke, he wrote down the first fifty but unfortunately, was then interrupted by “a man on business from (the local Somerset village of) Porlock.”   Once the business was concluded, Coleridge found the distraction had driven from his mind the rest of the poem.  All find Coleridge’s story charming but scholars doubt it’s true, the poet having used a similar excuse years before.  Most think it a case of writer’s block.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 't would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.