Xanadu
— — the grass where the summer palace used to stand.
Not only on a wall.
“Kublai Khan's summer capital, raised in 1256 on the steppe north of the Great Wall and abandoned a hundred and thirteen years later. Marco Polo described it; Coleridge dreamed it into a poem he never finished. What remains is a square of low earthen walls in the grass, with the foundations of the audience hall still visible where the wind comes off the open country. — from the studio
Xanadu, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Site of Xanadu — Shangdu in modern Chinese — lies in Zhenglan Banner of the Xilingol League in Inner Mongolia, about 350 kilometres north of Beijing on the southern edge of the Mongolian Plateau. Construction began in 1256 under the architect Liu Bingzhong on the orders of Kublai Khan, who used the city first as his primary capital and then, after moving the seat of the Yuan dynasty to Dadu (modern Beijing) in 1272, as the summer capital. The site was sacked and abandoned in 1369 during the Ming reconquest and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.
The city was laid out as three nested enclosures — outer, imperial, and palace — covering roughly 25,000 hectares including the surrounding ritual landscape, with the walled urban core itself about 2,200 metres on a side. Construction used pounded earth for the walls and dressed stone for the principal palace foundations. The Great Audience Hall, where Kublai received Marco Polo and the envoys of the Pope, survives as a raised stone platform near the centre of the palace city. UNESCO records the site as a rare surviving example of Mongol-Chinese urbanism.
Xanadu's afterlife in Western imagination begins with Marco Polo, whose account of his time at Kublai's court in the 1270s was widely read in late-medieval Europe. Five hundred years later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed the poem Kubla Khan in 1797, opening with the line In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree. The poem fixed the name in English as a byword for remote magnificence. The actual ruins were not surveyed by European archaeologists until the early twentieth century, and Chinese-led excavations have continued in the years since.