After more than three years on the road, a twenty-one-year-old Venetian named Marco Polo arrived with his father and uncle at Kublai Khan's summer capital, Shangdu, the place English poets later called Xanadu. They brought holy oil from Jerusalem and letters from the Pope. Marco later described a palace of gilded bamboo held up by silk ropes, a park full of deer, and ten thousand pure white mares. The words are imagined.