Thursday, July 6, 2017

See? I Told Ya It Was Real...!

I'm sure that Marco Polo would be saying something like that if he were alive when the legendary Xanadu was uncovered.

Marco was probably thought crazy when he told of the wondrous Xanadu, palace of the great Khan. In reality, it just sounded too great a place to be real. Turns out, Marco Polo wasn't exaggerating.

Xanadu: The Palace Of Kublai Khan



Photo credit: Zhenglan Qi Administration of Cultural Heritage of the site of Xanadu City

Marco Polo came back from China with some incredible descriptions of Kublai Khan’s empire. The most incredible of all, though, was Xanadu, the palace of the great khan.

Xanadu, Marco Polo said, was a marble palace surrounded by a massive, 26-kilometer-wide (16 mi) park filled with fountains, rivers, and wild animals. There, the khan kept 10,000 pure white horses in a golden palace guarded by dragons. It was, in short, a paradise unlike any on Earth.

The palace was destroyed by the Ming army in 1369, long before most Europeans got the chance to see it. As the centuries passed by, it slipped into legend. It was a place poets wrote about but was little more than the stuff of imagination.

Since then, though, the site of Kublai Khan’s palace has been uncovered, and we’ve found that Marco Polo wasn’t exaggerating. The khan’s home was twice as big as the White House, surrounded by a massive park that seems to have once held a wild menagerie of animals from around the world.

There are ramps for horses in every part of it, and it even has the dragons Marco Polo described. They’re statues sitting atop of pillars that have been painted yellow—but they’re posed exactly as he said they were.

Sometimes it turns out that the tall tales some folks tell are more than that, and just may contain a kernel of truth. Maybe we should listen a little better!

Coffee out on the patio again this morning.

5 comments:

Momlady said...

Isn't there a song about Xanadu? I have dragons in my yard.

linda m said...

Amazing how it turned out to be true. Just because a person hasn't seen something doesn't mean it didn't/doesn't exist.It's like the dinosaurs - if we hadn't found their bones would that mean they didn't exist? Hot and humid here today; better get my walk in early.

Hermit's Baby Sis said...

History just keeps on giving, right, Bubba? Now if we could just learn something from it ...

Big hugs ~

HermitJim said...

Hey Momlady...
Probably is, but I don't know for sure. So...what do you feed your dragons?
Thanks for stopping by today!


Hey Linda...
Probably not the first time he was considered to be a teller of tall tales. He was probably used to it.
Thanks for coming over today!


Hey Sis...
That's probably never going to happen. If you look at our past record, the chances are really slim!
Thanks, sis, for the visit today!

JO said...

Would love to see better n more pictures of it. Marco Polo was a strange little man it's no wonder not to many believed in him.

I'll sit on the patio for awhile have a follow up later this morning hope it doesn't take to long we are in another excessive heat warning and it is already 83 degrees