Xanadu, Mongolia
Xanadu, in Inner Mongolia, described in the famous Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, was the summer capital of Kubla Khan's Yuan Dynasty in China. The city is 2 km wide, and 1.4 km long and the palace alone, where Kublai Khan stayed in summer, has sides of roughly 550m, covering an area of around 40% the size of the Forbidden City in Beijing. The most visible modern-day remnants are the earthen walls. At its zenith, over 100,000 people lived within its walls. But in 1369 Xanadu was occupied by the Ming army and put to the torch. The last reigning Khan, Toghun Temür, fled the city. Today, only ruins remain, surrounded by a grassy mound that was once the city walls, but since 2002, restoration effort has been undertaken, and Xanadu has been officially declared a UN World Heritage Site.
