Exploring the World of the Great Kublai Khan

Post with Dragons on a Floral Ground
Before settling his capital at Dadu — now Beijing — Kublai dwelt further north at Shangdu, a city immortalized as "Xanadu" in the opium-inspired imagination of the British poet Samuel Coleridge. This stone pillar is one of the few objects retrieved from Shangdu. Its dragon imagery may look iconically Chinese, but the carpet of flowers that the creatures rest upon tell of the more Turkic, Central Asian artistic traditions sweeping into China on the back of its Mongol overlords.

• Treasures from the Forbidden City