Xanadu Ruins

Shangdu was built from 1256 as Kublai Khan's summer capital, a city of over a hundred thousand people laid out where the steppe meets the agricultural north, deliberately combining Mongol and Chinese planning: a walled palace city inside an imperial city inside an outer city, with grasslands beyond where the court kept its nomadic practices. Marco Polo described it, and Coleridge's 1816 poem fixed the name Xanadu in English as a byword for exotic splendour. The city was destroyed in the 1360s and what remains is earthworks, foundations, walls reduced to grassy ridges and scattered stone, inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2012. A museum interprets the layout.

What you actually see

• The city outlines - walls and foundations reduced to grass-covered ridges.
• The palace platform - the raised base of the main hall.
• The museum - reconstructions and finds explaining the city's plan.
• The steppe setting - open grassland where the Mongol court camped.

When to go

June to September, when the grassland is green and the site accessible; winter is severe and the site effectively closed. The plain is exposed with no shade, and wind is constant.

Honest expectations

There is very little standing: the site is earthworks and foundations, and imagination does most of the work. It is remote, with a car essential and several hours' drive from Beijing. English interpretation is limited to the museum.

Nearby

Duolun lies south; the Xilingol grasslands stretch north and west.