NO SIGNPOST points the way to Xanadu. A turning off a dirt road reveals a horseman tending a flock of sheep on the grasslands beneath the wide Inner Mongolian sky. A simple bridge spans a meandering stream before what remains of Kublai Khan's fabled summer capital.
Eight centuries ago the Great Khan created his legendary, stately pleasure dome here, and parts of the walls 'girdling twice five miles of fertile ground' are still visible.
Marco Polo reported that within those walls Kublai Khan had a garden containing 10,000 white mares whose milk 'no one else in the world dared drink ... only the Great Khan and his descendants.' Through the hunting park and in the hills to the north, the explorer said, the Khan rode with a leopard perched on the rump of his horse.
Recalling its magnificence, he called Xanadu the centre of the biggest empire in history. At his dazzling court the Great Khan assembled a population of 50,000, including Mongol warriors, Arabian astronomers, Tibetan lamas, Persian dancers, Taoist sages, Nestorian Christians from the Middle East, Kashmiri magicians and Chinese engineers, scholars and officials. 'No man since Adam has ruled over so many subjects or over such a vast territory, nor has any ruler ever been possessed of such treasure or of such power,' Marco Polo said in his Travels.
All that has vanished. Now frogs croak in the moat, and skylarks and orioles twitter above a pastoral scene. Along the walls where Mongol guards patrolled, the right of way is guarded by cashmere goats. Where was once a great imperial granary, prairie rats scamper around shards of pottery. The camping grounds of Kublai Khan's feared warriors are marshy meadows, and on the site of his marble palaces mares suckle new-born foals.
Xanadu is now the property of the May First State Farm, and grubby children peer from the doorways of houses made of mud and straw. It is used to produce special, experimental breeds of livestock for the provincial government and is home to 200 people. Peasants took bricks and stones from the walls to build farmhouses and cowsheds. The farm, which sprawls across the northern end of the city, was established by the People's Liberation Army in 1953 to supply meat for the Beijing garrison - who cared little for the area's past.
'No one talked about history in those days,' said Wang Gemin, an elderly peasant I met gathering cowpats to burn in his stove. There are around 60 households inside the remains of Xanadu's walls, and like others Wang has a crude hovel. He complains bitterly that no one on the farm has been paid for months.