Kublai Khan

ISBN-13: 9780553817188 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 480 str.

John Man

Opis

The authoritative biography of the great Mongol ruler, by the author of Genghis Khan and Attila.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree"
Kublai Khan lives on in the popular imagination thanks to these two lines of poetry by Coleridge. But the true story behind this legend is even more fantastic than the poem would have us believe.
Kublai Khan inherited the second largest land empire in history from his grandfather, Genghis Khan, and which he extended further, creating the biggest empire the world has ever seen; from China to Iraq, from Siberia to Afghanistan. His personal domain covered sixty-percent of all Asia, and one-fifth of the world's land area.
The West first learnt of this great Khan through the reports of Marco Polo. Kublai had not been born to rule, but had clawed his way to leadership, achieving power only in his 40s. He inherited Genghis Khan's great dream of world domination but unlike his grandfather he saw China and not Mongolia as the key to controlling power, and turned Genghis's unwieldy empire into a federation. Using China's great wealth, coupled with his shrewd and subtle governance, he created an empire that was the greatest since the fall of Rome, and shaped the modern world as we know it today. He gave China its modern-day borders and his legacy is that country's resurgence, and the superpower China of tomorrow.

O autorze

John Man is a historian and travel writer with a special interest in Mongolia. After reading German and French at Oxford he did two postgraduate courses, one in the history of science at Oxford, the other in Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

John has written acclaimed and highly successful biographies of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and Kublai Khan as well as Alpha Beta, on the history of the alphabet, and The Gutenberg Revolution, on the invention of printing.