Editing Shangdu (section)

== Literary and historical descriptions ==

=== Marco Polo ===

Marco Polo visited Shangdu around 1275. He described a marble palace with gilt rooms and an expansive park:

{{quote|There is at this place a very fine marble palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures... Round this Palace a wall is built... inside the Park there are fountains and rivers...}}

He also recounted a portable "cane palace," adorned with lacquered dragons and able to be dismantled for travel:

{{quote|The whole Palace is built of these canes... it can all be taken to pieces and removed whithersoever the Emperor may command.}}

=== Toghon Temür ===

After the loss of Shangdu and Daidu in 1368, the last Yuan emperor composed a lament, excerpted from the ''Altan Tobchi'':

{{quote|My Yellow Steppe of Xanadu, the summer residence of ancient Khans... Jewel Daidu was built with many an adornment... I have lost it all – to China.}}

=== Samuel Purchas ===

In 1614, English clergyman Samuel Purchas described "Xandu" as a pleasure palace with a vast park and a cane palace:

{{quote|In Xandu did Kublai Khan build a stately Pallace... in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to place.}}

His 1625 edition expanded the detail, echoing Marco Polo's account:

{{quote|In this enclosure... are goodly meadows, springs, rivers... In the middest in a faire wood he hath a royall House on pillars gilded and varnished...}}

=== Samuel Taylor Coleridge ===

Inspired by Purchas's account, Coleridge dreamt of Xanadu while under the influence of opium and began writing the poem ''Kubla Khan'' (1797):

{{poemquote|
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.}}