Kublai Khan by John Man
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan; A stately pleasure dome decree". Kublai Khan lives on in the popular imagination thanks to these two lines of poetry by Coleridge. But, the true story behind this legend is even more fantastic than the poem would have us believe. He inherited the second largest land empire in history from his grandfather, Genghis Khan. He, promptly, set about extending this into the biggest empire the world has ever seen, extending his rule from China to Iraq, from Siberia to Afghanistan. His personal domain covered sixty-percent of all Asia, and one-fifth of the world's land area. The West first learnt of this great Khan through the reports of Marco Polo. Kublai had not been born to rule, but had clawed his way to leadership, achieving power only in his 40s. He had inherited Genghis Khan's great dream of world domination. But, unlike his grandfather, he saw China and not Mongolia as the key to controlling power and turned Genghis' unwieldy empire into a federation. Using China's great wealth, coupled with his shrewd and subtle government, he created an empire that was the greatest since the fall of Rome, and shaped the modern world as we know it today. He gave China its modern-day borders, and his legacy is that country's resurgence, and the superpower China of tomorrow.
John Man is a historian and travel writer with a special interest in Mongolia. After reading German and French at Oxford he did two postgraduate courses, one in the history of science at Oxford , the other in Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies. His GOBI: TRACKING THE DESERT (Weidenfeld, 1997) was the first book on the subject in English since the 1920s. He is also the author of THE ATLAS OF THE YEAR 1000, (Penguin 1999), ALPHA BETA (Headline, 2000) on the roots of the Roman alphabet, THE GUTENBERG REVOLUTION (Headline 2002) on the origins and impact of printing, and GENGHIS KHAN.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780593054482 |
| ISBN 10 | 0593054482 |
| Title | Kublai Khan |
| Author | John Man |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Transworld Publishers Ltd |
| Year published | 2006-04-03 |
| Number of pages | 400 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |