Xilingol is in Inner Mongolia, in North China.
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Inner Mongolia · City Guide
Xilingol, Where Xanadu Actually Is.
Overview
Why Go
Kublai Khan's summer capital stood here, and it is the Xanadu of Marco Polo, of Coleridge's poem and of Citizen Kane. It is a World Heritage site. What survives is rammed-earth walls and grass; no palace stands.
The Ujimqin steppe in the east of the league has been grazed and never cultivated, so the plant community is the original one. Many Chinese grassland a visitor sees has been broken at some point.
Erenhot, on the Mongolian frontier, sits in Cretaceous beds that have produced dinosaur material since the 1920s expeditions. There is a fossil field, a museum and two enormous sculpted dinosaurs arching over the road.
Duolun grew around the temple the Kangxi emperor founded in 1691 after the assembly he held with the Mongol nobility here. The temple remains, a Hui quarter and a slow grassland town are what is left of it.
Wrestling, horse racing and archery, held by banner rather than centrally, usually in July or August. Dates move every year and each banner sets its own, so this is something to ask about rather than plan around.
See
The outer and palace walls survive as earth banks with the street grid readable in the grass, plus a good site museum. Wind blows hard across it. Half a day including the museum and the shuttle.
Open grazing country in the far east of the league with herding families, horses and very little tourism infrastructure. Visitors need a vehicle and ideally a contact. Two days minimum.
A fossil field, a dinosaur museum and the border crossing into Mongolia, all within a short drive of the town. The gateway sculptures on the road in are worth the photograph. Half a day.
An eighteenth-century Gelugpa monastery on the edge of Xilinhot, partly ruined and partly restored, with murals in the surviving halls. The main monastery in the league. Ninety minutes.
The 1691 temple and the old Hui and Mongol quarters around it, in a low grassland town that was once a major Buddhist and trading centre. Half a day, and the drive from Beijing is about five hours.
A river that loops back on itself across flat grass, with a viewing ridge above the bends. Parts of Wolf Totem were filmed here. It is a particularly photographed spot in the league. Half a day.
On the Map
Approximate locations of the attractions above, across Xilingol.
Eat
Mutton boiled in salted water, nothing added, cut off the bone with a knife. The Sunid and Ujimqin breeds raised here are the ones Chinese chefs ask for by name, and this is the plainest way to judge them.
Milk soured and pressed into hard curd blocks, and the skimmed skin rolled and dried. Both keep without refrigeration, which is why they exist. Sour, dense and an acquired taste with tea.
Brick tea boiled with milk and salt, drunk all day with fried millet, curd and butter stirred in. It is salty rather than sweet, which surprises many visitors, and refusing a bowl in a household is awkward.
A whole lamb roasted on a frame, ordered a day ahead and eaten by a table of ten or more. It is a banquet dish for a group, not something to order for two, and camps price it as one item.
Do
The gates, the inner palace enclosure and the street lines all read as banks and hollows in the grass. Do the museum at the start so visitors know what they are looking at, then walk the outer wall.
Each banner holds its own and the dates shift with the lunar calendar and the grass. Ask at the banner cultural office or a guesthouse a month out. The small ones are better than the advertised ones.
Arrange it through a local contact rather than a arrangement site. Step over the threshold, never on it, take the bowl with the right hand, and accept the opening tea even if visitors do not want it.
Bone is still visible in situ in the marked pits outside the town, and the museum holds what has been lifted. Collecting anything is illegal and enforced. Take the border crossing photograph on the way past.
When
Green grass, wildflowers and Naadam season. The sole months the grassland looks the way visitors expect, and the busiest.
The ideal month: grass gold, air sharp, herds being moved and almost nobody around. Nights already drop below freezing.
Brown, windy and increasingly cold, with Xanadu at its bleakest, which some people prefer. Camps close from October.
Deep cold to minus thirty, then a dusty brown spring that does not green up until late May. Not the season for the steppe.
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Xilingol is in Inner Mongolia, in North China.
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