Heaven is Round, Earth is Square - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 143

XAM-DU) onto the first half of an iambic tetrameter (in-XA na-DU did-KU bla-
KHAN) - into Xanadu. The name is right, as are the historical references the map
supplies. The Jurchens established the Jin dynasty and built a capital here at the
southern edge of the Gobi Desert in the twelfth century. Khubilai Khan rebuilt it
in 1256 as his capital, only to abandon it nine years later in favour of Beijing, six
years before formally declaring the founding of the Yuan dynasty. What isn't right
is the location. Xanadu lay 300 kilometres directly north of Beijing. On the Selden
map it lies about twice that distance to the east. Once again the map is 'wrong',
but that doesn't give us the right to chastise the cartographer. Xanadu disappeared
three centuries before he drew the map. This may explain the gourd-shaped la-
bel. Gourds were the Aladdin's lamps of Chinese imagination, out of which could
emerge fantastical visions. By using a gourd, the cartographer has marked it as a
placeintheimagination,aplacethatdidnotexist-whichisliterallywhattheEng-
lish 'utopia' means.
Wilde would have approved, and so should we, for Xanadu will prove to be one
of the trace elements that allow us in the final chapter to reconstruct just how the
Selden map got drawn in the unusual way it did.