Word: kubla
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Perhaps the most stark ghost city is Kangbashi, in Inner Mongolia. Built in just five years, Kangbashi was designed to be the showcase urban center of Ordos City, a relatively wealthy coal-mining hub that's home to 1.5 million people. A public-works project worthy of Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure-dome," Kangbashi is filled with office towers, administrative centers, government buildings, museums, theaters and sports fields - not to mention acre on acre of subdivisions overflowing with middle-class duplexes and bungalows. The only problem: the district was originally designed to house, support and entertain 1 million people...
...that thing is a mall called Xanadu, located in East Rutherford. The name is a nod to the heavenly summer home immortalized by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree." It's also the name of a ridiculous 1980 Olivia Newton-John movie involving roller-skating muses and disco. Slated to open in August, Xanadu, a wannabe shopping paradise, will be a 2.4 million-sq.-ft. retail and entertainment complex located 3½ miles from the Empire State Building, across the Hudson River at the intersection of the New Jersey Turnpike...
...casualty on the expedition. Four weeks into the journey, he injured his left leg and lapsed into a high-fevered delirium. During his illness, Roosevelt, in a strange choice of literature, kept reciting the opening line of a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.” When the team returned safely to civilization, they realized that they had discovered a 1,500-kilometer river that was later named “Teodoro...
...year-old Dane proved to be as ambitious a choreographer of spectacle as D.W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille. Leaving behind the rush and grind of the city, opera-goers would be transported up a 100-m terraced plateau, into gilded pleasure domes worthy of Kubla Khan, with cavernous interiors of blue and silver, red and gold, transporting audiences into ecstasy. But when Utzon left the project in 1966, leaving its completion to a committee of local designers, audiences were left without their climax. Halls were swapped, interiors muted and Utzon's iconic shells became, in his own words...
...Fifty-seven years after World War II ended, Japan is finally embracing its kamikaze past. Named after the "winds of god" that saved Japan from Kubla Khan's invading ships in the 13th century, these pilots used to be viewed with pained embarrassment by Japanese as symbols of the horror and insanity of the war. Humiliated by defeat and desperate to move on, Japan buried the memory of these men whose chillingly simple mission was to fly into American battleships...