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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.
The thrilling opening lines of Coleridge's opium-fueled fantasy still send a tingle down the spine.
As a teenager, I was mesmerized by this vision of exotic and mysterious pleasures.
But I had no idea that Coleridge was, in fact, writing about a historical figure.
Because Kublai Khan is the 13th-century Chinese emperor,
and Xanadu merely the English form of Shangdu, his imperial summer capital.
Kublai Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongols from 1206 and terror of the world.
Reaking havoc everywhere, Genghis Khan established the Mongol Empire,
a superpower that ran from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and from Cambodia to the Arctic.
Kublai Khan, his grandson, extended the empire and became Emperor of China,
which leads us to the objects for this program.
Under the Mongol emperors, China developed one of the most enduring
and successful luxury products in the history of the world.
A product fit for stately pleasure domes,
but which spread in a matter of centuries from grand palaces to simple parlors all over the world.
It's Chinese blue and white porcelain.
We now think of blue and white as quintessentially Chinese,
but as we shall discover, this is not how it began.