Al: I appreciate the opportunity to interview about the expedition to discover Genghis Khan's burial site. I don't think many know about it unless they listen to NPR.
John: My pleasure. I was speaking to Maury Kravitz, who first conceived the expedition, and I told him I was going to be speaking to you. He mentioned that in the last two years our expedition has had very little publicity. We did not issue a press release after last year's aborted expedition. So, he is very interested that we are doing this interview.

Al: Before going any further. What is the exact pronunciation and spelling of Genghis Khan?

John: That's the French version. The Mongolians like you to spell it-Chinggis Khan and pronounce it "Chingiz Khan". Chinggis Khan is very important for the Mongol national identity. We are talking about a very young nation. It has only been since 1990 that there have been Chinggis Khan t-shirts, hotels, cigarettes, beer, and restaurants all over the place. These things were not allowed during the period of Soviet influence. There is a tremendous interest in Chinggis Khan in Mongolia today.

Al: How are you going about looking for his burial site?

John: A Mongolian document, The Secret History of the Mongols, estimated to have been completed in 1240, is being used by us. One of our team, Dambyn Bazargur, has taken information from this document and has tried to map it to the terrain of modern Mongolia. What we have done has been to verify claims that Bazargur has made in his atlas. That's why we were led to certain places as opposed to others.

Two years ago, we went to one of the sites where most people believe he is buried in a mountain called Burkhan Khaldun but were literally driven off by blood sucking flies-big flies. We are going to need helicopters and all sorts of equipment, which we just don't have at this point.

Instead, we began to investigate on the side of a large hill called Oglogchin Kherem. There is wall that goes all the way around the hill and all the way up the side. It is two miles in circumference and ranges in height from eight to twelve feet. It was a huge undertaking. When we saw it, we wondered who could have built this and for what purpose? It would have taken a pretty large organized group of people to have built it.

When we excavated the sites, we began to discover a series of depressions in the ground. When we excavated these depressions, we came across a flagstone-like terraces. When we picked the stones up, we found underneath them, sets of channels. In these channels, we could see blackened areas, possibly from burning charcoal. There were animal and human remains in those channels.

Al: Was it a crematorium?
John: We still don't know. There have been various theories about it. It could be a heating system, a settlement, which is not borne out, by the fact that there are no other signs of settlement there. We have since found out that there are similar structures that have been excavated by a Russian expedition in Tuva, which is up northwest of where we are in the Russian Federation, which makes some sense. If they were Mongol structures, that would fit with their general migration patterns that we think they followed from the northwest down into Mongolia.

Al: Would they have been nomads mostly during this period of time?

John: The term nomads is a misnomer. Let me give you an idea. We are not talking about people traveling great distances, like the horse nomads of parts of Turkey or Iran who would travel as much as two hundred kilometers to go from summer to winter homes. People don't move that much here. Some of these tents were fairly permanent. So, you are talking about fairly short movements, not long ones.

We found a skull of a young woman near one of these channels. We know that it was not a burial because we had only the skull and either the humerus or femur. Therefore, I'm thinking that these channels might be sacrificial.

Al: Was she burned?

John: There was burning all around, but it was not a burial that's for sure.

Al: What is it like conducting a dig in a foreign country like Mongolia?
John: Here are some problems we had last year: the former prime minister attacked us for desecrating sacred sites, spoiling the environment, and running our camp for monetary gain. Finally, anthrax broke out there. We had to finish last year after we had only excavated for a month. However, we did find those channels. We spent the rest of our time in the parliament building talking to people after we were ordered to cease and desist by the president's office. We had all the proper documentation, permissions, etc. to work there. Fortunately, the present prime minister eventually took us under his protection and our project now has the full support of the Mongolian government.

While we were away, some of our Mongol colleagues stayed on the site, and they found a burial about a meter down. We have since taken the wood from the coffin and have ascertained that the coffin dates from the 13^th to the first part of the 14^th century-that was the Mongol period. We further know that it was a Mongol burial because it was orientated toward the north, which is the Mongol custom. When they build a building, the door is always toward the south.

Al: What is the reason for this?

John: The north is a position of honor. That is where the head of the household sits. And the other burial like this that we found was oriented toward the west and was very badly deteriorated. This one is so well preserved. We found an urn there and tried to ascertain whether it was food or what would have been inside it. Perhaps water. Whatever it was inside, it was meant to accompany you on the journey to the other side.

Al: Did you find any other artifacts?
John: No. The artifacts that we found this year like arrowheads, spikes, and nails were found in one area. They weren't enough to allow us to say that there was some wooden construction that had somehow fallen down. If we had found a lot of these nails/spikes, I would have been very happy, because then we would have known that there was something that had been built there.

That year was a disappointment as a hunt for the tomb, but it was also quite exciting archaeologically. We didn't find a treasure, but we were able to come to some conclusions about that site. It is definitely a burial ground, and the internal area that is sectioned off was probably the area that was set aside for the worship of the ancestors. However, there was the one burial inside it. It seems that most of the burials are mainly outside this enclosed area. Our current thinking it is that this was a ritual burial site with burials made outside the enclosed areas. That site had been used for a very long time, but we are no closer to knowing why the wall was erected around it.

We excavated inside the wall itself this year, and we found some organic material that may allow us to date this building of the wall. We would like to send off a sample to have it carbon dated, but we just don't have to funds right now for testing.

Al: Is there any way of knowing what the terrain was like at the time? Are you fairly confident that this is pretty much what it looked like?

John: I would assume that those areas were probably covered with forests very much like they are today. There are lots of fires there. These fires are generally caused by lightning strikes, so I assume that that was probably a phenomenon at the time also-forest that were burned and then replenished. I don't think there has been any big change. I know that one of the theories about the movement of the Mongols and a lot of other people for that matter, is the so-called "desiccation theory" where a place dries out and cannot not any longer support people and animals. So, they have to move some other place. We do know that there are cycles of wet and dry periods in Mongolia. We happened to be there during this summer; it was exceptionally wet. The rain caused us so much trouble that a lot of the instrumentation that we had taken along with us was useless. I think the last big wet period occurred in 1994. It goes in cycles, and I don't think there is any reason to think that the land has changed tremendously over the centuries.

Al: How did you got involved in this project?
John: I had taught a course here for a number of years, still do as a matter of fact, on the Mongols. I was much more interested in the impact that the Mongols had on the Middle East, particularly Islamic Central Asia and Iran, which are my area of specialization. I didn't consider myself a Mongolist at all, but I had a very strong interest in the Mongols. In 1995, Maury had gone off to Mongolia and had signed a five-year agreement with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences that would allow him to explore various sites and places relating to the life of Chingis Khan. After signing the agreement, he came back to the States and realized that he didn't have anyone other than himself to work on the project. He was going to have to put together a team of people. I think he developed quite a following over the years, because he was written up a number of times in the media. In the 80s, he had been a very prominent trader in the commodities and made a lot of money. There was this whole mystique about him. He was this lawyer and trader who had a lifelong fascination with Chingis Khan. In the 50s, when he was in the army, he read a book about the life of Chinggis Khan by Harold Lamb biography entitled, Emperor of All Men.

Al: So, it was that book that caught his imagination.

John: Yes. It started with that book. Two years ago, we were at a place in Mongolia that we affectionately call Mt. Maury. He was back in Chicago. I called him and said, "Maury, you've got to tell me now because we are here at a graveyard that is extends for about three km. along the top of a mountain. If you know something, you've got to tell me now." He said, "I can't find it right now." I replied, "What do you mean! We are here! We are ready to start doing something! You've got to tell me!" He finally told me, "Well, it's in some old book. I asked what book? There are only about five sources that it could come from. In this book, Chinggis Khan had talked about a place where he wanted to be buried. He had coupled it somehow with another statement where Chinggis Khan stood at the confluence of two rivers and could look over his shoulder and see snow-capped mountains. Somehow, Maury had taken those two things as the place where he was buried. The place where he could see the mountain over his shoulder and the place where he said he would like to be buried. But, it turned out it was a huge graveyard. Maury did not go up to the top of the man to see these graves that just unrolled before your eyes.

So, it turns out that this was Maury's site, and he then put all his eggs in this basket of where we are now. It very well could be the burial place of Chinggis Khan's father. Now, if his father was buried there, it is possible that Chinggis Khan himself might be buried there. Or would he have been taken to another place for a more imperial burial ground. They might they have moved the remains of the father after the son had become so famous-he had conquered the world. Would they have moved the bones of the father to this new site? The Mongolians say absolutely not; it would never happen. They wouldn't do that unlike Christians, Muslims, and Jews who do move bones. The Mongolians wouldn't do that because of this Shamanistic notion that you could destroy a person's spirit by interfering with their physical remains.

Al: Why would you assume that you would find Chinggis Khan along with many others?
John: Well, there's a tradition, and I think it comes out in Chinese sources, that Chinggis Khan and his fourth son and his son's descendants, are buried together. The fourth son, as well as his brother, Monke, Kublai, and all the great khans of Mongolia, are buried together. Supposedly, thirty-four are supposed to be buried in one place. I can understand or follow the notion that it's a secret burial place. I understand how you could keep it a secret about one person, but how do you keep it a secret of thirty-four? That seems impossible. In addition, this is the thing that came up about the wall. If you wanted to have a secret place, why would you build a huge wall around it?

Well, the wall could have been built at a later time. In fact, there is a tradition, again it is from the Chinese sources, that Kublai Khan's grandson, his name was Kamala, was a military governor of that area. Kamala is credited from sources with having built a number of structures for the worship of his ancestors. Now, I would love it if this wall were built by Kamala. However, it still could be built for the worship of ancestors and not be the grave of Chinggis Khan.

There are many graves inside this area still. Whatever we said at the time, there may be more than that. Our group looked at this issue this summer, and they all seemed to be pre-Mongolian. We don't know what period these graves may derive from, but we found the grave at the base of a rock formation that we call "the stupa."

There is one thing that is very appealing to me: this is very curious to me. It looks like an ideal place where people could have dug into the side of this place. I would really like to examine this more thoroughly.

Al: What would you do-test boring and such?
John: Probably. There have been a number of developments just in the last few days. We have a different idea for next year. I would like to go other sites. I would like to encourage the Mongolians to propose our current spot as a World Heritage Site. There is nothing else like it in Mongolia, maybe not even in Asia. It is a large graveyard. It is a very beautiful site naturally. It reminded me of when I first saw when I first saw Agamemnon's tomb in Greece. I would like to see this place continue to develop. Now that we have found more than one grave, we can petition the Mongolian government to declare this a protected site. The government will protect it, and then apply for World Heritage Site status, which takes years. I could possibly help us with fundraising. We are at the point now where investors may or may not be so hot about continuing to support our archaeological investigations. Mongolia is a virgin archeological area. It is filled with sites.

So, we plan to continue. I want to divide our workforce in half: half of the people would continue to work on this, and the other half would work on satellite expeditions. We are going to a couple other places that are recommended to us by our "ancient" Mongolian archeologist. He says that he is a piece of archeology himself. He's 80 years old and is an incredible guy. There is a saying in Mongolia that a Mongolian 70 years old is dead. Here is this guy 80 years old who is just an incredibly vigorous person. I want to start next year, half the people here will continue to develop this site, the other half, one of these two other places.

Al: I'm not sure whether it was you or Maury that predicted on NPR that there are more artifacts in Chinggis Khan's tomb than had ever been discovered in the history of archeology.

John: Maury feels that way. His argument runs something like this: Chinggis Khan conquered northern China, he conquered central Asia, and some of the most important Islamic cities of the period. How is it that not one single artifact from any of those areas of conquest has ever turned up any museum or private collection in the world? Where are those things? Well, Maury believes that they are all buried with Chinggis Khan. But we just don't know. There has been no imperial Mongolian period tombs ever found. None of the other descendants of Chinggis Khan have even been found either.

The great-grandsons of Chinggis Khan in Iran were the last ones according to a near-contemporary source buried in Mongol fashion in those lands with sacrifices of young girls and large amounts of arms and booty. They are buried on an island, we know where that island is, and no one has ever found those tombs either. We have never found the tombs to know what to expect. According to Maury's argument, there are great treasures to be found, and that is why he was designated a treasure hunter and that he is going for all the treasures. However, if we did find treasures, they would belong to Mongolia. We wouldn't be able to take anything out of the country unless they allowed us to take something for exhibition, for analysis, or to study. I have said to others that this expedition focuses attention on the importance of other parts of the world and their history. If I can cause people to look at the importance of other parts of the world and the contributions of other peoples to world history, I will have achieved part of my aim. This is what I have spent my whole life doing as an educator. In addition, this is one of the greatest adventures that a man my age could hope to participate in.

Al: I have heard that the story of the search for Chinggis Khan's tomb is being made into a movie.
John: MGM is making a movie about this. I think they are in the third revision of the screenplay right now. They have a pretty good story here if they can somehow weave all the threads together--it could be pretty interesting. The last I heard about who they were thinking about playing the people involved--They were going to rejoin Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Caine was going to play me, so I thought that was pretty good, although he is older than I am.

Al: I'll be sure to look for the movie. With all the time that you have lived with Chinggis Khan, do you have a sense of him?

John: We have a history that's written more or less in his lifetime by someone who probably knew him, and that's about as close as you can get, aside from just purely projecting yourself and reliving the past. He was a guy who when he was a kid, was afraid of dogs. His father said when the father is about to die, "Take care of my son, and remember he is afraid of big dogs. Watch out for that." There is no physical description of him anywhere. There is one reference in a work that was written in north India that stated that he was tall and broad shouldered and had eyes like a cat. All the Chinese versions of what he looked like make him look like a Confucian prince.

There is a modern painting that Maury had commissioned and of course, it looks little like Maury. There is an official one that is used in all ceremonies, etc. in Mongolia, but nobody is really happy with it. It is the Chinese version and Mongolians don't like Chinese very much. There is the Indian version of what he looked like, but it looks like a typical Indian Muslim ruler. So, what did he look like? No one knows.

Al: What is the tie between the Mongolians and Tibetans?
John: Buddhism. It comes to Mongolia in the 16^th century. There had been ties back to Kublai Khan. He actually supposedly became a Buddhist. Buddhism had spread among some the children of Chinggis Khan, but the Mongolian Buddhism now really derives from the 16^th century when one of the rulers of Mongolia converted. After the Mongols had been kicked out of China, they went back into Mongolia. One of the rulers invited the Dalai Lama of the time to come to Mongolia. So the Mongolian people as a whole say they have been Buddhists since the 16^th century. They follow Tibetan Buddhism, which allows some scope for persistence of shamans, shamanism, and holy men.

Al: I tried to get an interview with the Dali Lama last weekend and failed for my second time, but we are good friends with his brother and were in Bloomington, Indiana for the dedication of the new temple. His Holiness had come back for the dedication. In the honored seats in front of the Dalai Lama were Tibetans and next to them were the Mongolians.

John: Oh, I'm sure. I have become very interested in Tibetan Buddhism myself.

Al: Tell me about your childhood.

John: I was born in Aruba.

Al: So, how did a nice kid from Aruba get to the University of Chicago?

John: My father was in the construction business. He was an electrician who was forced to leave college in the Depression. He began to work on foreign jobs because they paid more than jobs in the U.S., and I was born on the first foreign job they went on which was in Aruba. There was a big oil refinery there. He worked on foreign jobs all this life, and we lived my earlier years into my teenager years in Latin America-Venezuela specifically. In 1955, he got a job in Iraq, so we were off to Baghdad. My father was always concerned about me getting proper credits to get into college in the States. He was very determined that I was going to go to college and finish which he had not done. The nearest good American school was in Beirut. There was a correspondence school in Baghdad, but he didn't want me to do that. He wanted me to have a real proper education, so he sent me off to Beirut. It was a wonderful school. I was there in 1955-56. It was a good school that has been around since 1906. It turns out there are a half-dozen people on the faculty at the University of Chicago that went to that school in Beirut. That's pretty amazing. The school sponsored trips to areas all around there, so in a very short time we went to Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt. I got to see almost all of the Middle East. Then when I came back to Baghdad in the summer after I graduated my dad took me to Iran. He had been in Iran during WWII at a refinery there. In the space of a year and a half, I saw the Middle East, and I never got over it. I floundered around in college for awhile until I really realized that I wanted to do something with the Middle East.

Al: : You got your doctorate at Princeton? Where was your undergraduate work?

John: University of Texas. That was about the time of the passage of the National Defense Education Act that was passed in 1958, which was in my junior year. Money started coming into universities in '59-'60 for the study of foreign languages and Arabic was one of the languages that was deemed to be critical to national security. This Center of which I am the director has been getting money from the government since the early 1960s. Since that time, we have been training people in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and now Uzbek and Armenian.

Al: Would you speak to the problems that we are having in the Middle East presently with the so-called clash of civilization. We have certainly aggravated the extreme right in Islam.

John: Well, that was aggravated a long time ago. We didn't do that necessarily ourselves.

Al: Can you give me your take on Osama and his gripes with Americans. Is it primarily being our troops being on holy ground-that of Saudi Arabia. He does seem to be agitated about modernity in the West, and it really seems to cause him concern. It seems that the modernity issue empowers or motivates him to stop it.
John: Well, questions about Islamic identity in the modern world have asked for over a century in the Islamic world. It goes back to the time when people debated issues such as how Islam and the railroad fit together. There was within Islam a movement called Islamic Modernism. One of the last living practitioners of that was my colleague, Fazlur Rahman, here until his death in 1988. His picture hangs in the room across the hall. He believed that it was necessary, in fact, absolutely vital that Islam had to accommodate itself to modernity.

I think rather it's a coming together of maybe related and unrelated trends: one is the rise of America to sole dominance in the world-something that many people date from the time of the Spanish-American War and the rise of America to an empire. This ascendancy is certainly true after WWII. Then there is the so-called defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Now, America is the sole and unchallenged power of the world. That coincides with the rise of globalization, economic globalization, etc. In Mongolia for example, China has recently complained to the Mongolian government that it is becoming too Americanized, which it probably is.

Islam and the Islamic world have had an adversarial relationship with the Western culture since WWI. Before that of course, most of the Islamic world had been colonized or had some form of dependence on the European powers. After WWI, that began to change. Early in 1920s, there were uprisings against the Western powers throughout the Islamic world all the way from the Riff War in Morocco to the revolts against the Dutch in Indonesia. This agitation eventually got submerged in WWII. After WWII, there was a massive decolonization allegedly, in which these countries became independent, and some got rid of those ruling strata that had been imposed on them. The monarch of Egypt was overthrown in the early 50s or the monarch in Iraq set up by the British was overthrown in 1958 or more recently, the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of several former Soviet republics. This was seen by many Muslims as a sign, the same way that evangelicals are looking at the creation of Israel as being one of the signs of the end-days and the rapture. Muslims saw the liberation of these Muslim republics in Central Asia as such a sign. In Afghanistan, our government attempted to use things like Jihad against the USSR. Then there is the whole Palestinian conflict and our continued support of hated regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. Saddam Hussein is a kind of super Noriega. He was our guy once wasn't he? The time when he was gassing the Kurds was the time when Rumsfeld's and all those people were cozying up to him. So, there is this. I think these three things created the problem: the American rise on the unchallenged world power, economic globalization, and the resurgence of a sense of self-determination in Islamic countries.

Al: Christianity and the West had their problems with modernity during the Middle Ages. Even after that, the church didn't respond well to modernity. The Vatican took off after Galileo and we wrestled with the Scopes' Monkey trial.
John: But the world has changed and technology has also changed. There may be this strain of anti-modernity, but they have not been reluctant to use the most modern means of communication. I was listening to someone who said that the weapons of mass destruction that destroyed the World Trade Center were box cutters. Actually, the weapons were airplanes with aviation fuel, but box cutters may have been the things that started it. They also used email and all kinds of communication devices to coordinate their terrorism.

In medieval times some Muslim didn't want to accept gunpowder weapons at first. They considered them dirty and people didn't want to use them. It was also considered unmanly. After a while, they couldn't argue with success. The whole society has got to change though, in order for these things to be utilized. Bernard Lewis has written a book called What Went Wrong. It came out just at the time of 9/11, and he says that the Islamic world failed in its attempts to become like us. He points to a couple of things. One was that they lost the spirit of scientific inquiry-it's interesting to understand how you have it, and you lose it. They don't like Western music, they are not open to the culture, and they don't respect women.

I don't know whether that explains very much to me. When my mother was born, American women didn't have the right to vote. One of the arguments about how if you had set foot on the earth about the time the Pilgrims disembarking at Plymouth Rock looked around the world, the most powerful nations were all Islamic ones. These were the most powerful, richest culturally on earth. What happened in that period of four hundred years since the 1600s?

Al: Could you explain that?
John: Well, one of the things is that they lost control of their own destiny. Europeans gained control of the entire world and acquired mastery of all the major trade routes. They gained economic dominance that enabled them to gain military and political dominance over most of the world, not just the Middle East, but China as well as India, Africa, other traditional societies as well. Europe and America became the odd men out as far as I can see. That's why we get back to this issue of Iraqi society. I would submit to you that the structure of Iraqi society is probably the way societies are structured in most other parts of the world except for Europe and the U.S. Why do we take ourselves as a measure of all things. Maybe we are the best, biggest, and wealthiest, but why we would measure everybody else by our standards. I would submit that most of the rest of the world is like Iraq and has had similar historical experiences. However, why do we think that everyone else needs to be like us? People have tried to explain this. Fredrick Jackson Turner advanced his famous frontier thesis that sought to explain why Americans were this sort of "get it done, kick ass, manifest destiny" type of people. It was the frontier that did it supposedly.

I have been thinking a lot about this Mafia business and the informal relations as opposed to the development of formal instruments of government in the Western world. I am not saying that one is better than the other. I do know that I am glad I am in America, but at least I have spent enough time in these other places that I can see how the other thing works. I was thinking about how I have to teach a course in the winters, an undergrad course, it covers a long period of time, 1000 to 1800 in the Middle East and Islamic world. I am going to make this a theme this next year...just try it out and see if we can talk more about the society and the way it is structured as a means of explaining the basic notion that government is incidental or illegitimate in most cases. I know that flies in the face of the way that we portray these governments with brutal dictators who lop people's heads off.

Al: What happens to the poor peasant out here? Two-thirds of the world is in poverty anyway. What happens to those people?

John: They go on-just like they always have. You see, Americans and Westerners are inculcated with some notion that things are supposed to get better and better. We accept the notion of technological and social progress. Well, you are of an age to understand that that wisdom does not expand the same as technology. Each generation has got to relearn the same things. That is why there is no progress in wisdom and experience. What is the saying, "As I got older, I realized how smart my father really was"? Nonetheless, we are inculcated with this notion that everything is getting better and better. People in other societies don't necessarily feel that, and maybe it's an illusion.

Al: My wife and I have done a lot of traveling from India, Tibet, Nepal, Polynesia, Easter Island to Chile. What is truly intriguing is that they all have cyber cafes. It really is interesting to watch young people get connected for about a quarter. They email their cyber friends all over the world.

John: There are more cafes and discos per capita in Ulaanbaatar than in any other place I have been in my life. The per capita income in Mongolia is $1000/year. That place is awash in money. There are more beautiful girls there dressed in the latest styles trying to find something to do with themselves than any place I have ever been in my life. I'm involved in a project which may bring a certain number of Cineplex movie theaters to downtown Ulaanbaatar. They will have a new business center, which will have fast food franchises like Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin Robbins. I was just in Korea walking through the airport and saw a Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin Robbins. I thought that the Mongolians are going to like these also! There is nothing like this in Mongolia. Day after tomorrow the person who is behind building this business center is going to be talking to McDonald's China about a McDonald's in Ulaanbaatar. There isn't one there yet, but these are all signs of modernity and being with it.

Al: Doesn't that bother you?
John: Of course, it bothers me! But how are you going to change it? If you want an experience of getting away from all that modernity, you can still get into the countryside of Mongolia. Aside from seeing a satellite dish, you can be pretty far away from modern life. Mongolia is still relatively untouched. All of this sort of stuff is going on inside of Ulaanbaatar. Half the people of Mongolia live in the capital. The rest of the people are spread through the country that is twice the size of Texas. Mongolia is as big as Alaska with a population of a million people.

Al: One quick question before we end the interview: Samuel Coleridge wrote the poem, 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.

The story was that he penned those words while under the influence of heroin. Wordsworth came to Coleridge's front door and asked him a question, which brought him back to reality. After Wordsworth left, Coleridge went back to his desk but couldn't write another word. That is why Xanadu ends so abruptly. Where did Coleridge come up with Kubla Khan and Xanadu?

John: I think probably he might have read about some palace that Kubla Khan might have built in Beijing or somewhere else. It might have been something like that. But it is a great poem.

Al: Thanks for the information; I have often wondered about it. In closing, what are your plans for returning to Mongolia?
John: I am planning on taking a year off starting next year. I am going to go and teach Persian in the Mongolian State University as a way to help the Mongolians recover their past. There is no one there that does that now. I've never done anything quite like that.