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Shangdu ( Chinese: 上 都; pinyin: Shàngdū; pronounced [ʂâŋtú]; lit. 'Upper Capital'; Mongolian: ᠱᠠᠩᠳᠤ, Mongolian Cyrillic: Шанду, romanized : Šandu ), more popularly known as Xanadu ( / ˈzænəduː / ZAN-ə-doo ), was the summer capital [1] [2] of the Yuan dynasty of China before Kublai moved his throne to the former ...
- The Summer Capital
- Layout & Buildings
- A Host to Important Events
- Described by Marco Polo
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Legacy
In the 13th century, the Mongol Empire ruled most of Asia and their capital was moved from Karakorum (Qaraqorum) in Mongolia to Xanadu in northeast China in 1263. Kublai Khan's first name for the new capital was Kaiping, but he then renamed it Xanadu/Shangdu, meaning 'Upper Capital' in 1273 when the capital was moved again, this time to Daidu (aka ...
The khan himself shunned his nomadic roots and, unlike his grandfather, the Mongol Empire's founder Genghis Khan (r. 1206-1227), he decided he had had enough of living in yurt tents and instead had a fine palace built. The city, designed by Kublai's Chinese advisor Liu Bingzhong (1216-1274), was also given earth circuit walls and towers, creating t...
The city frequently hosted great feasts and hunting parties but was an important host in other areas, too. In 1260 it had hosted a meeting of the Mongol tribal chiefs, akurultai, to officially proclaim Kublai the Great Khan or 'universal ruler' of the Mongol Empire. In 1275 the Great Khan called another kurultai at Xanadu, this time to decide how t...
The Venetian explorer Marco Polo (1254-1324) travelled across Asia and served at Kublai Khan's court between c. 1275 and 1292. On his return to Europe, Marco wrote of his experiences in his book The Travels of Marco Polo or Travels (Description of the World), first circulated c. 1298. In Book 1, chapter 57 of this extraordinary work, Marco describe...
Perhaps the most famous work today of the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) but another of his critically acclaimed poems isKubla Khan (written in 1797, published in 1816), in which he, too, describes Xanadu (although not from any personal experience). The poem is the origin of that now m...
Today the site of Xanadu is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, and there are ruins and remains of the foundations of palaces, temples, walls, tombs, a canal, and waterways. Xanadu, though, really exists with far greater clarity in the imagination than it does in the reality of ruins. Both Polo and Coleridge's works contributed immeasurably ...
- Mark Cartwright
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Xanadu, place in the opium-induced vision that English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridgerecorded in the poetic fragment “Kubla Khan” (1798). Coleridge’s fantasyland was based on Shangdu (“Upper Capital”), near present-day Duolun in Inner Mongolia, to which the real Kublai Khanmoved the seat of Mongol government in the early 1260s.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Site of Xanadu. Photo by Boj Capati. The Site of Xanadu encompasses the remains of Kublai Khan's legendary summer capital of the Yuan Dynasty. The grassland capital at the edge of the Mongolian plateau includes the former city with temples and palaces, water control works, tombs, and traditional ovoo (stone cairn) shrines of the Mongolian nomads.
The site is the remains of Kublai Khan's capital city, designed by his Chinese advisor in 1256. It reflects the cultural and religious exchange between Mongol and Han Chinese, and features temples, palaces, tombs and canals.
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Site of Xanadu was the capital of the Yuan Dynasty founded by Kublai Khan in 1256. It is a fusion of Mongolian and Chinese cultures, with palaces, temples, tombs and canals.
