Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan is a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge which takes its title from the Mongol/Chinese emperor Kublai Khan, of the Yuan dynasty. Coleridge claimed that it was written in the autumn of 1797 at a farmhouse near Exmoor, but it may have been composed on one of a number of other visits to the farm. It may also have been revised a number of times before it was first published in 1816.

In popular culture

• The plot of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a novel by Douglas Adams, is closely tied with Coleridge's poem, in a way that is obscure until the end of the book.
• As his palatial mansion is named Xanadu, the opening lines also appear in the film Citizen Kane.
• The opening lines (slightly paraphrased) were also used by the 1980s UK band Frankie Goes to Hollywood and was the basis for the title track of their first Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
• The Rush song Xanadu is also based on the poem.
• The 1999 computer game Alpha Centauri uses the last lines of the poem to accompany the "Paradise Garden" base facility.
• David Grapham's apocalyptic science fiction book Down to a Sunless Sea is explicitly named for a phrase from this poem.