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Abstract
Dadu served as the capital throughout much of the reign of the *Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) over their Chinese empire. Both its site (largely) and the essentials of its design have served as the model for a Chinese capital ever since. In 1267, *Khublai Khan (1215–1294; r. 1260–1294) began to build a city at some remove to the south of the then Yuan capital of *Shangdu (Upper Capital), immortalized by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as Xanadu and described by *Marco Polo in his Travels. Known to the Chinese as Dadu (Great Capital), to the Turks as Khanbalikh (City of the Khans) and to the Mongols themselves as Taidu, this new city, as had been the case with Shangdu, was an explicitly Chinese city, designed for the Khan by his trusted adviser Liu Bingzhong (1216–1274) and based upon prescriptions found in the Confucian canon. The site had been that of the capitals of the *Liao (907–1115) and *Jin dynasties (1115–1260), but the new city was built from scratch with the help of Muslim architects, as a triple-walled city whose concentric boundaries each had a perfect geometric form, thus embodying age-old Chinese conceptions of the place of the capital of China and the emperor’s role in the cosmos; the city being understood as a simulacrum on earth of the order of the Heavens themselves.

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