Definition of "Xanadu"

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.

1797, S[amuel] T[aylor] Coleridge, “Kubla Khan: Or A Vision in a Dream”, in Christabel: Kubla Khan, a Vision: The Pains of Sleep, London: […] John Murray, […], by William Bulmer and Co. […], published 1816, page 55

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.

1991, Don Rosa, “Return to Xanadu”, in Uncle Scrooge, volumes 261-262, page 5

A place where nobody dared to goThe love that we came to knowThey call it XanaduAnd now, open your eyes and seeWhat we have made is realWe are in Xanadu

2003, Party Animals (lyrics and music), “Xanadu”‎

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.

2013, Esther Allen, Susan Bernofsky, In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, page 240

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.

2013, Mary Daheim, The Alpine Xanadu, page 319

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

1994, Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies, page 21

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

2003, Jim Bell, Stephen Brown, David Carson, Marketing Apocalypse: Eschatology, Escapology and the Illusion of the End.

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: […]

2011, John McPhee, Oranges, page 68

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

2012, Mario Puzo, Fools Die, page 6

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.

2012, Gavin Souter, Times & Tides: A Middle Harbour Memoir