Xanadu (noun) = a place so luxurious or beautiful, that it is almost unattainably so (pronounced ‘zan-uh-doo’) for full explanation, see box below
e.g. Coco Chanel regarded the Ritz, Paris as her own Xanadu: she lived there for 30 years and died there in 1971
‘Xanadu’ was the name of the beautiful city where Kublai Khan (1215–94), Emperor of China (and grandson of Genghis Khan), spent his summers. Located in what is now called Inner Mongolia, about 350 km north of present-day Beijing, Xanadu (built between 1252 and 1256) was a most striking place, which had 100,000 people living inside it at its peak. Venetian explorer Marco Polo – who visited the city in 1275 – described it thus: ‘a very fine marble Palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment. Round this Palace a wall is built, enclosing a compass of 16 miles, and inside the Park there are fountains and rivers and brooks, and beautiful meadows, with all kinds of wild animals (excluding such as are of ferocious nature), which the Emperor has procured and placed there to supply food for his gerfalcons and hawks, which he keeps there in mew.’
But it was the poet Samuel Coleridge who immortalised the city in his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ (1797); Coleridge wrote the poem after reading a rival historical account of the city, smoking a lot of opium, then falling asleep and having a vision of the place. The poem starts thus,
‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.’
As a result of these melodious words, ‘Xanadu’ became a byword for luxury and has been referenced in numerous ways since: ‘Xanadu’, for example, was the name of Charles Foster Kane’s estate in the film Citizen Kane; and in an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry refers to George’s bathroom, with its view of the Manhattan skyline and private bar, as ‘Xanadu’.