Xanadu

I will be honest about why I went to Xanadu: I wanted to stand in the place from the poem. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” — the stately pleasure-dome, the sacred river, the caves of ice — is one of the few poems I can still recite, and the idea that the city behind it was a real place on the Inner Mongolian steppe, reachable by a long drive from Zhenglan Banner, was irresistible. Lia, who finds my literary pilgrimages mildly ridiculous, came anyway, mostly for the grassland.

What is actually there

Here is the thing nobody tells you: Xanadu — Shangdu, the summer capital that Kublai Khan built in the 1260s — is almost entirely gone. What survives is a vast rectangular ground plan of low earthen ramparts, grassed over, spreading across the open steppe: the outline of city walls, the faint footprint of the imperial palace, a few stone foundations, a stele or two. You do not see a pleasure-dome. You see the idea of one, drawn in turf, and you have to do the rest yourself. I found that more moving than a restored monument would have been. This was the seat of an empire that ran from Korea to Hungary, and the grass has quietly taken almost all of it back.

The site is a UNESCO World Heritage listing now, with a small museum and a boardwalk that keeps you off the most fragile earthworks, and on the windy afternoon we visited there were perhaps six other people in the entire vast enclosure. I walked out to where the palace foundations are marked and tried to summon Marco Polo, who described feasting here, and white mares whose milk was reserved for the Khan, and a summer court of unimaginable splendour. The wind took all of it. There was only the steppe, the larks, and Lia some distance off, photographing a marmot that had clearly never been told it was standing in a former imperial capital.

The grassland delivers anyway

What saved the trip from being a meditation on impermanence was the country around the ruins, which is glorious. This is true Xilingol steppe — open grassland rolling to every horizon, dotted with herds and the occasional white ger, the sky doing the enormous dramatic things that big-sky country does. We had arranged to stay the night in a ger camp near the site, and the evening was the best part of the whole excursion: mutton boiled simply and eaten with our hands, fermented mare’s milk that I drank out of politeness and Lia refused with admirable honesty, and a night sky so thick with stars that the Milky Way looked like spilled flour.

So: do not come to Xanadu for spectacle. Come for the strange double pleasure of standing where something colossal once stood and finding only wind and grass — and then for the steppe itself, which has outlasted the Khan and his pleasure-dome and will outlast us too. Coleridge, who never came within five thousand miles of the place, somehow got the feeling exactly right.

When to go: June to early September, when the grassland is green and the gers are open; the steppe winter is brutal and the site effectively shuts. July brings wildflowers and the most reliable ger-camp hospitality.