Xanadu — properly Shangdu (上都), the Upper Capital — was the summer residence of the Yuan dynasty emperors. It stood on the high steppe north of the Great Wall, where felt tents and brick palaces met under a sky that was, by all accounts, unusually clear.
Marco Polo wrote of marble halls and gardens that ran for sixteen miles. Coleridge, who never went, wrote of caverns measureless to man. Both descriptions are, for our purposes here, equally cited.
Coleridge composed Kubla Khan in an opium-haunted morning at a farmhouse in Somerset; a person from Porlock interrupted him; the rest of the poem was lost. The fragment that remained — fifty-four lines — was published nineteen years later at the urging of Byron.
It is one of the very few works of English verse that imagines an architecture rather than describes one. The lines do not say what Xanadu looked like. They say what its geometry felt like. This distinction is, in our view, the entire content of the wiki.
In 1960, Ted Nelson began designing Project Xanadu — a hypertext system in which every document was permanently addressable, every quotation retained its provenance, and the act of citation paid the cited author. He coined the words hypertext and transclusion. He has been working on the project, in some form, for sixty-five years.
The web that we have is not the web that he proposed. Xanadu the project remains, like Xanadu the place, an unfinished masterpiece — a high garden glimpsed through dust.
Coleridge, S. T. (1816). Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream. London: John Murray.
Polo, M. (c. 1300). Il Milione.
Nelson, T. H. (1980). Literary Machines. Self-published.
Rossabi, M. (1988). Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times. University of California Press.