Because of an ancient town in China

China has enchanted those outside its domain for a long time.  Marco Polo journeyed to China in around 1275 and was enamored beyond telling, writing about it in very glorious terms. 350 years later, Samuel Purchas of England wrote an account of some of the Kahns in China using Marco Polo's account.  He, too, wrote enchantingly about China and about a city in particular.  Its name has a number of spellings since Chinese script is not alphabetic, and travelers there approximated the sounds they heard in different ways, Ciandu and Shangdu being the most popular.  One of the Chinese Kahns of the region wrote an account of his city about a hundred years after its establishment, however, and it is from this account Samuel Purchas immortalized the current spelling of this beautiful capital city.  Purchas wrote of the inner court of the city, "In this enclosure or parke are goodly meadows, springs, rivers, red and fallow deere, fawnes carrying thither for the hawkes...," and a great number of other descriptions about the splendor of this city.

122 years after Purchas wrote his book about this city in China, a fellow Englishman, Coleridge, read Purchas' account of this beautiful capital city of China built in the time of Kubla Kahn, son of the great Genghis Kahn and was taken by its description.  Coleridge was actually reading the description and smoking opium for his illness (so he says) when he fell asleep and a dream came to him about this great capital city.  Upon waking from sleep, he sat down and began to write the images he saw in his dream.  He began his poem with the same words that Purchas started his account, "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn."  From there Coleridge constructed a poem of vivid imagery, clear in its every detail.  It begins,

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

I particularly like the end of the poem, or fragment as Coleridge calls it.  A woman playing a dulcimer binds a spell on everyone with her music wooing people to see that she had inspired Kubla to build this city for all to admire him, the builder.

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his golden hair!...

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

I retreat in my mind often to the sacred scenes of Xanadu, to the pleasure dome, to the sacred river, to the caverns, and to the woman playing the dulcimer providing inspiration to do something people are in awe of.