Mongolia is Relevant: Xanadu

Like Timbuktu and Arcadia, Xanadu is familiar as a semi-mythical place name used symbolically. Just as Timbuktu is synonymous with remoteness, Xanadu conjures images of exotic opulence, excess, and transient pleasure. Made famous by a Coleridge poem, the idea of “Xanadu” took on a life of its own; it is the name of Kane’s castle in Citizen Kane and the title of a fantasy film from the eighties featuring Olivia Newton-John. So what exactly is Xanadu? Is it a real place? And how did it come to be associated with party estates and nightclubs?

Like so many things in life, it all comes back to the Mongols. I encountered the world “Xanadu” here much more than I have in US; there’s a Xanadu bookshop (that, mysteriously, is also a wine shop), a gallery, and I think a café/restaurant or two. So what does Mongolia have to do with Xanadu? Xanadu is the European term for Shangdu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan. When he wasn’t busy ruling most of China and trying to juggle defeating his enemies with making (and conquering) new ones, Kublai needed to unwind, and according to Marco Polo, Shangdu was the place to do it. Polo described the acres of gardens, filled with streams, pastures, and animals for hunting, as well as a gilded palace that was completely moveable (like a giant golden ger). Samuel Taylor Coleridge took the image to new heights with his poem “Kubla Khan,” an elaborate fictionalized description of Xanadu that Coleridge wrote after he dreamt of the Khan in his gardens. (Opium was involved.) So although our image of Xanadu of a paradise of pleasure might not be completely true to life, the excess of the Mongols has been enshrined by Europeans in the implications of the single word “Xanadu,” and this term has evolved to describe the excess of the West as well.

But if Kublai’s cool summer capital was Shangdu, where did he spend his winters? In his carefully planned “grand capital” Tai-Tu. He moved his administrative capital from Karakorum down to what is now part of China; no one knows why exactly the capital was moved, though scholars speculate that it may have been to keep better tabs on the Chinese part of his empire. And what now stands on the ruins of Tai-tu? Beijing, the current capital of China.

So a Mongol is responsible for the a fictionalized image of paradise (Xanadu), and for what is not only still a real city, but also still a pretty significant city.