Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. In Kudnaudid Kugla Khan, a stately pleasure-dome decree where Alf the sacred river ran through caverns

measureless to man, to a sumless sea.

The thrilling opening lines of Coleridge's opium-fueled fantasy still send a tingle down the spine. As a teenager I was

mesmerised by this vision of exotic and mysterious pleasures, but I had no idea

that Coleridge was in fact writing about a historical figure because Kubla Khan is the 13th century Chinese Emperor and Xanadu merely the English form of Shandu, his imperial summer capital. Kubla Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan, ruler of the

Mongols from 1206 and terror of the world. Reaking havoc everywhere, Genghis Khan established the Mongol Empire, a superpower

that ran from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and from Cambodia to the Arctic.

Kubla Khan, his grandson, extended the empire and became

Emperor of China, which leads us of the most enduring and successful luxury to simple parlors all over the world.

It's Chinese blue and white porcelain.

We now think of blue and white as quintessentially Chinese,

but as we shall discover, this is not how it began. This archetypal Chinese

aesthetic comes in fact from Iran.

The fascinating thing about these fathers is that they are so beautiful and mysterious and yet they seem tremendously familiar.

If you say Chinese porcelain, this is what you think of, this white background and this brilliant blue color,

but it hasn't been there forever. It was a novelty at this period.

A history of the world in a hundred objects. The David Vouses, from China, made in 1351.

The programs this week look at high status objects from all over the world around

700 years ago, objects which tell us about the taste and the ambitions, political and social, religious and

intellectual, of the people who owned them.

Thanks to the long Chinese habit of writing on objects, we know exactly who made the two blue and white porcelain vases in this programme, which

gods they were offered to, and indeed the very day on which they were dedicated.

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