Xanadu (Shangdu) Ruins

UNESCO World Heritage Site, Site Of Xanadu, Inscribed 2012; The Summer Capital Of Kublai Khan And The Yuan Dynasty, Founded 1256 And Destroyed In 1369 · Zhenglan Banner, Inner Mongolia

This is Xanadu - the actual one, the summer capital Kublai Khan raised on the Mongolian grassland in 1256, where the court came up from Beijing each year to escape the heat, where Marco Polo says he saw a palace of marble and a park of ten thousand horses, and which Coleridge, who had never been within five thousand miles of it, turned into the most famous opium dream in English poetry. Ming armies burned it in 1369 and the grass took the rest. What a visitor finds today is the honest truth of the place: a great rectangle of earth ramparts standing a few metres above the steppe, the stone platform of the main audience hall, foundation lines of streets and gates, a carved tortoise base, and an enormous quantity of sky. It is UNESCO-inscribed, it is one of the most consequential sites in Eurasian history, and it is visually almost nothing. Come for what happened here, not for what stands here.

Zhenglan Banner, Xilingol League, Zhenglan Banner, Inner Mongolia, China

Open seasonally, generally from around May or June to September or October, roughly 8:00-18:00, and CLOSED OR EFFECTIVELY UNREACHABLE FOR MUCH OF THE WINTER - confirm the gate is open before making the journey. A modest ticket covers the site and museum; THE INTERNAL SHUTTLE IS USUALLY A SEPARATE CHARGE AND IS CLOSE TO ESSENTIAL given the distances. BE CLEAR WHAT IS THERE: earth ramparts, foundation lines and a stone platform in open grassland, not standing buildings. Do the museum first; the ruins are unreadable without it.

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