Xanadu

Xanadu ( /ˈzæn.ə.duː/; Mongolian: šanadu), or Shangdu (Chinese: 上都; pinyin: Shàngdū, ) was the summer capital of Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty in China, before he decided to move the seat of his dynasty to the Jin Dynasty capital of Zhōngdū (Chinese: 中都), which he renamed Dàdū, the present-day Beijing. Xanadu was visited by the Venetian traveler Marco Polo in about 1275, and in 1797 inspired a famous poem, Kubla Khan, by one of the leading English poets of the Romanticism movement, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.