That's from the poem of the legend of Kubla Kahn's palace in the lost valley of Xanadu! Alph was the river in the legend! Unca Scrooge, this is the road to Xanadu! You've hit the jackpot! The most wondrous valley on earth! The land of milk and honey!
Refers to Kubla Khan, a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

A place where nobody dared to go
The love that we came to know
They call it Xanadu
And now, open your eyes and see
What we have made is real

The lyric, as the ideological critics in particular would have it, plays host to a panoply of enticing pipe dreams conjured up by benighted idealists whose visions are doomed in advance to frustration as reality fails, time and again, to ratify their various Xanadus and Byzantiums.

I never guessed that when I stumbled into the sheriff's office on a warm August afternoon, I'd met my future. I'd had no dream of finding my own little Eden, my snowcapped paradise, my Xanadu in the Valley of the Sky.

“The United States in the twenties was dotted with a thousand Xanadus,” wrote movie-theater historian Ben Hall."

The postmodern Xanadus that support this hallucination in the desert offer a particularly attractive paradise of the popular.

The Normans went Muslim with such remarkable style that even Muslim poets were soon praising the new Norman Xanadus. Of one such place, which included nine brooks and a small lake with an island covered with lemon and orange trees, the poet Abd ur-Rahman Ibn Mohammed Ibn Omar wrote: […]

Under the blazing Nevada sun, a dozen Xanadus glittered with million-watt neon signs.

My only company among the vanished pleasures was a four-foot-long goanna, warily immobile on the stone wall, then slowly climbing a tree trunk, pausing now and then to check on me. Elsewhere in Middle Harbour there are half a dozen other abandoned Xanadus.

Xanadu

Meaning

Noun

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