Kublai Khan's most well-known achievement was the establishment of a magnificent summer palace at Shang-tu in northern China. Better known to us as Xanadu, Marco Polo describes it as "a huge palace of marble and other ornamental stones." There were "fully sixteen miles of parkland well watered with springs and streams and diversified with lawns." Within the parkland grazed "animals of all sorts, such as hart, stag and roebuck" which the khan kept "for recreation and sport."
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