In Xanadu: A Quest

This travel book follows the route of Marco Polo from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem to the ruins of Kublai Khan's summer capital at Shangdu, the Xanadu of Coleridge's poem. Dalrymple travels overland through the Levant, Anatolia, Iran, Pakistan, and China, comparing what he sees with Polo's Description of the World and with later travellers. Buses, borders, pilgrims, and police occupy the practical narrative; monasteries, caravanserais, and desert cities supply the historical one. The book is a journey in the present tense of the late Cold War years, using a medieval itinerary as its spine, not a biography of Polo.

Bound in paper, printed with a design by Sarah Hanson.