Book description
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Kublai Khan lives on in the popular imagination thanks to these two
lines of poetry by Coleridge. But the true story behind this legend is
even more fantastic than the poem would have us believe. He inherited
the second largest land empire in history from his grandfather,
Genghis Khan. He promptly set about extending this into the biggest
empire the world has ever seen, extending his rule from China to Iraq,
from Siberia to Afghanistan. His personal domain covered sixty-percent
of all Asia, and one-fifth of the world's land area.
The West first learnt of this great Khan through the reports of
Marco Polo. Kublai had not been born to rule, but had clawed his way
to leadership, achieving power only in his 40s. He had inherited
Genghis Khan's great dream of world domination. But unlike his
grandfather he saw China and not Mongolia as the key to controlling
power and turned Genghis' unwieldy empire into a federation. Using
China's great wealth, coupled with his shrewd and subtle government,
he created an empire that was the greatest since the fall of Rome, and
shaped the modern world as we know it today. He gave China its
modern-day borders and his legacy is that country's resurgence, and
the superpower China of tomorrow.
John Man is a historian and travel writer with a special interest
in Mongolia. After reading German and French at Oxford he did two
postgraduate courses, one in the history of science at Oxford , the
other in Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
John has written acclaimed and highly successful biographies of
Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and Kublai Khan as well as Alpha Beta, on
the history of the alphabet, and The Gutenberg Revolution, on the
invention of printing. He is fast becoming one of the world's most
widely read historians.
