In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree.
-- Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Xanadu: The Imaginary Place
Published by: Tandem Library, 1999
ISBN: 1417608919

Xanadu: The Imaginary Place is a children's book put together by the Charlesbridge Publishing Staff together with John Hope Franklin. They asked a bunch of elementary school children to write and/or draw about a perfect country... anything they wanted.

Xanadu would be like chocolate. There is a rainbow up in the sky and the air smells sweet like sugar. The people in Xanadu look so pretty. Clothes are made of gold and silver silk. Coats are made of fake fur.

The book includes drawings, stories, poetry, and simple descriptions. It is marketed for children from ages 9 to 12, based on reading level, but is probably more interesting (or amusing) for adult readers. It gets most of its mileage from being cute.

The house of Charles Foster Kane, in the movie Citizen Kane. Welles did not use an actual setting but a series of matte paintings with three-dimensional miniatures. The Xanadu scenes - in particular those with Kane and his wife Susan - reveal the difference between Kane as a young man running his empire and Kane as an isolated older man (e.g., the physical distance between husband and wife at the dining table).

Kubla Khan a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge first brought Xanadu into focus. The poem dealt with a mythical exotic land where a king called Kubla Khan built a stately pleasure dome close to the sacred river Alph. The poem was written in a stupor as Coleridge was supposed to be an opium addict and is said to be incomplete. However, there has been a lot of recent curiosity about whether there was/is a real Xanadu or not. An interesting quest in this regard is that of William Dalrymple who travelled from Jerusalem to Peking in search of Xanadu.