Fierce Mongols Had Soft Spot for Puppies, Gold, Actresses, Art

So wondrous was the court of Khubilai Khan that its memory floated through the centuries until an English poet captured it in dreamy rhymes: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797.

A portrait of the pie-faced Mongol lord (the grandson of Genghis Khan), who established the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and became emperor of China, is among the more than 200 works evoking “The World of Khubilai Khan,” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.