Xanadu at last!

On July 20, Jeanne and I finally arrived in Xanadu!

The Chinese call it Yuan Shangdu - the "upper capital" of the Yuan Dynasty, but it was in fact the site of Kublai Khan's summer palace. Most Chinese have never heard of it, but we managed to find a guide and driver brave enough to try to find it.

Let me tell you, Xanadu is hard to find! We drove ten hours north from Beijing to an obscure (but growing!) town in Inner Mongolia called Duolun, and it was a hard drive. For at least an hour we were on unpaved roads, mostly going over the mountains, with a cliff going up on our right side and a steep cliff going down on our left, through a rock quarry, fording a stream, over mud roads and gravel and extremely bumpy, uneven, rocky patches of "road." Our driver was cheerful the whole way, despite the fact that he was not driving an SUV but rather a fancy Chinese-made car called a "Red Flag." That car will need a tune-up very soon. The scenery along the way was gorgeous: lush green mountains, corn-planted valleys, up and up and up, over several mountain ranges, then to a high plateau, the rolling grasslands of Mongolia.

On the map, Duolun looks like a tiny town, but it now has THREE stoplights and many new buildings and many wide streets lined with shops and restaurants, as well as fancy street lights and a big town square with a roller skating rink, paddle boats on a small lake, and live music at night - right outside our hotel window! We ate spicy mutton kebabs and cheese sticks for dinner. We stayed at the fanciest hotel in Duolun, a two-star hotel, and our room was, well, um, spacious.

The next morning, we drove half an hour due west of town to "Yuan Shangdu," Xanadu. I had to keep pinching myself to believe I was really there. I had been told there was not much to see there, and this is true, but there was more than I expected. A number of stone walls are still standing, crumbling, in the green grasslands. Our guide, Miss Dong, told us where the original palace and palace walls stood, where the garden was, where guests stayed, where the hunting grounds were and the forest. She even told us where, exactly, Marco Polo met Kublai Khan. I had described Xanadu as in a valley, but that is not exactly right. It is in a flat grassy plain, and you can see mountains all around, but in the distance. In July, the grasses are covered with a profusion of wildflowers of all colors, including many kinds that are used in Chinese medicine, especially "jinlianhua" - a golden flower that is dried and used in tea to cure throat and respiratory ailments. We later bought some. I wish I could send some to Paul right away - he's got a killer sore throat and cough.

I learned many facts about Xanadu that I didn't know. Kublai Khan insisted that the floors be earthen, because he did not want to lose his Mongolian connection to the earth. The gates were lined up perfectly North-South, in a straight axis with the palace in Beijing, except off by two degrees, by design, because nothing is perfect, even in nature. The garden was smaller than I thought, and the surrounding land bigger. And the palace was surrounded by thick walls and protected with a moat. I will definitely need to make some revisions in my book.

Overall - it was a thrill to visit Xanadu.