![]() The Cane Palace, ancestor to Coleridge's stately pleasure dome, would be round like a Mongolian ger (tent), made of bamboo from the newly conquered Chinese south. Just 275km north of what would be the new dynastic Chinese capital Dadu (today's Beijing), it sat on the old Mongolian plateau Kublai himself had these dual allegiances – Mongol, Chinese – and political pragmatism impelled him to nurture both. Shangdu was the spot chosen by 13th-century emperor Kublai Khan for his summer capital. Fewer people, I think, will be prompted by the name Xanadu to think of northern China's Shangdu, a place every bit as real as Coleridge's dream-place was fantastical. ![]() For others, its name will evoke the 1980 film musical in which an otherworldly Olivia Newton-John appears obligingly on Earth to sing with an aged Gene Kelly (on roller-skates). F or many it will for ever be the setting for the emperor's "pleasure dome" – the wild landscape of sacred rivers, caves of ice, vast chasms and sunless seas in Coleridge's Kubla Khan. ![]()
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