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Around the World in Books / Xanadu
Opium Was His Literary Muse
Mongolia’s Xanadu inspired a famous poem by a poet who admitted that getting high helped him with it
In 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem with an origin story almost as famous as its opening line: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.” Coleridge said he wrote the poem after an opium-influenced dream, and generations of writers have used his head trip — not always jokingly — to justify blowing the rent money on hallucinogenic drugs.
“Kubla Khan” is one of the most famous poems — maybe the most famous — ever written by a poet who admitted that getting high had inspired him. That fact may help to explain a misconception about Xanadu: that it was a mythical place, like the golden city of El Dorado or the Himalayan paradise of Shangri-La. In fact, it was the storied capital of the empire of the Mongolian ruler Kublai Khan (1215–1294), the grandson of fierce Genghis.
Xanadu is a city, not a country, so it’s is slightly out of step with my “Around the World in Books” series, which is reviewing 30 books about 30 countries in alphabetical order of the country names. But it’s a fascinating place — or was — so here are few facts about it.
