Word: kublai
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...place is the last example of idealized, high-despotic city planning, a rich hick cousin of all the imaginary and perfect townships that architects from Filarete in the 15th century to Boullée in the 18th wrought from their schematic, authoritarian fantasies but never managed to build. Unlike Kublai Khan's pleasure dome, it exists on a plane of unremitting kitsch, sustained by the most advanced technology ever brought to the service of entertainment...
Over the headquarters gate are the Roman numeral four and some words in Vietnamese. The congressman asked if Kublai Khan had built the area. The general said he understood it had been the French. Must be hell to have everything in your country built by somebody else, said the congressman...
...empire overrun by the invading Mongols, China's last Sung emperor was cast into the sea. Kublai Khan became lord of an empire that stretched from Korea to Mesopotamia. In the next 90 years under the Yuan dynasty, which he founded, China experienced what seems to have been a wideranging artistic reorientation. Yet until recently, Chinese scholars could never bring themselves to study in depth this hated era of foreign domination...
...cities of China have been traditionally governed by boards of elders, mainly local merchants. Emperors Genghis and Kublai Khan, and those of the late Manchu dynasty, accepted the system and financed their activities by levying tribute on the cities according to size...
...actors are plainly demoralized. Quinn, who plays a head-shaven Kublai Khan, just sort of sits there on his throne looking like Yul Brynner with a nasty case of jaundice. Welles, who plays a Venetian savant, is all dressed up to look like Leonardo da Vinci, but then he queers the pitch by muttering something about a navigational device he calls an "astrolobe." Horst Bucholz, who plays the acrobattling hero, obviously doesn't have the thighs for this sort of work, but he makes up for that with some of the niftiest karate ever seen in medieval Persia...