Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [61]
Kublai Khan’s hunting camp, for all its rustic pleasures, served merely as a summer retreat. Three days’ journey over the Steppe brought the Mongol ruler to his celebrated summer palace, Shang-tu—or Xanadu, as it became known in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phantasmagoric poem “Kubla Khan.”
DESPITE THE fantastic attributes for which it is known in the West, Xanadu was a real place, as solid as the ground underfoot, and Marco Polo came to know it well. “In this city,” he tells his readers, “Kublai Khan made a vast palace of marble cunningly worked and of other fair stone.” Here Marco beheld the sights whose mere description would inflame Coleridge’s opium-besotted cortex.
Marco writes: “The halls and rooms and passages are all gilded and wonderfully painted within with pictures and images of beasts and birds and trees and flowers and many kinds of things, so well and so cunningly that it is a delight and wonder to see. From this palace is built a second wall which in the direction opposite to the palace, closing one end in the wall of the city on one side and the other on the other side, encloses sixteen miles of land. It is fortified like a castle in which are fountains and rivers of running water and very beautiful lawns and groves.”
These elysian fields contained the splendid royal zoo. “The Great Khan keeps all sorts of beasts there, that is, harts and bucks and roe-deer, and has them given to the falcons and gerfalcons, which he keeps in a mew. He does that often for his pleasure and amusement. In the middle of the park where there is a most beautiful grove, the Great Khan”—still envisioned only at a distance, not yet seen directly, but his presence becoming more deeply felt with every passing mile—“has made for his dwelling a great palace or loggia that is all of canes [that is, bamboo]…and on top of each pillar is a great dragon all gilded that winds the tail round the pillar and holds up the ceiling with the head, and stretches out the arms, one to the right for the support of the ceiling with the head, and the other in the same way to the left…. The roof of this palace is also all of canes gilded and varnished so well and so thickly that no water can hurt it, and the paintings can never be washed out; and it is the most wonderful thing in the world to be understood by one who has not seen it.”
His powers of observation sharpening, Marco describes this marvel of Mongol engineering, the edifice that Coleridge memorialized about five hundred years later as Kublai Khan’s “stately pleasure dome.” “The canes from which these dwellings are made are more than three or four palms thick and are from ten to fifteen paces long. One cuts them across in half at the knot, from one knot to the other, and splits them through the middle lengthwise, and then a tile is made. Of these canes that are so thick and large are made pillars, beams, and partitions, [so] that one can roof a whole house with them and do all from the beginning. This palace of the Great Khan, of which I have spoken, was made entirely from canes. Each tile of cane is fixed with nails for protection from the winds, and they make those canes so well set together and joined that they protect the house from rain and send the water downward.”
Still more amazing, the entire elaborate structure was collapsible and portable, just like the modest gers in which the nomadic Mongols dwelled. This was, after all, a nomadic culture, on all levels. Marco goes on: “The Great Khan has made it so arranged that he might have it easily taken away and easily set up, put together and taken to pieces, without any harm whenever he wished, for when it is raised and put together more than two hundred very strong ropes of silk held it up in the manner of tents all round about, because, owing to the lightness of the canes, it would be thrown to the ground by the wind.
“And I tell you the Great Khan stays there in that park three months of the year, this is June and July and August, sometimes in the marble palace, and sometimes