Shortly after retiring as a corporate economist, my wife (also an economist at a local college) and I applied to teach at a Chinese University. There we met another Connecticut teacher who was a member of the Morgan Group and introduced us to archaeology in Connecticut at the Rocky Hill dig. Two years later, again back in China but without my wife, I persuaded our Connecticut friend Andre Salsedo, to join me in searching for Xanadu, the site of Kubla Khan's summer palace where the 13^th-century emperor met Marco Polo. Polo's account of his trip to China was an inspiration to Christopher Columbus, and the palace was immortalized in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge beginning, "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree..."

The general location of Xanadu was fairly well known, 200 or so miles north of Beijing in Inner Mongolia, a province of the People's Republic of China. A physician attached to the British Embassy casually mentioned it in the middle of his 1872 report on a biology field trip. The palace had been torn up and a lamasery containing 108 temples and some 3,000 monks occupied the site for several hundred years.

The site was further damaged after the Boxer Rebellion in 1901 and by the Japanese who camped within the palace during World War II. We found out about it in William Dalyrmyple's In Xanadu (Vintage Departures, Random House 1990). As an honors project Dalyrmyple, a Cambridge student, had researched Marco Polo's trip and found the way there, only to be arrested by Chinese police and evicted with only a brief tantalizing sight of the place.

With the help of one of Andre's students as translator and negotiator we discovered we had to go to Hohohot, the capital of the Province of Inner Mongolia, for permission, even though it was several hundred miles out of our way. We needed the approval of five government agencies before we could take the trip; in many cases foreigners were not allowed to enter the agency offices and we relied on Maria, our translator.

After several days in Hohohot negotiating we paid the equivalent of $91 for permission to go to Xanadu and take pictures - but no digging or removing artifacts. An hour's plane trip north to the local capital of Xilinghot got us to the shoving-off place, then proceeding by minibus to the small town of Zheng Lan Qi about five hours away through part of the Gobi Desert. After a night in a crude but comfortable guest house (it was April and still cold) we were off again to Shandu (Xanadu) about 20 miles away.

Little remains other than the outer wall of Xanadu. There is a central "statue," probably from the time of the monks, and some shallow holes in the wall undoubtedly used by shepherds. There are a few foundations of the temples and a large sundial of stone. The ground is littered with pottery fragments from roof tiles and a few pieces of iridescent glass suggesting there may have been some luxury in the royal court of Kubla Khan. After encounters with the local police and the provincial government - which extorted an additional $91 from us before allowing us to leave - we were able to fly back to civilization.

Although the site had been trashed many times, the only real archaeology at Xanadu was done by Japanese scholars who followed their military in the takeover of China before World War II. The Mongolians made it clear they did not want excavation, so only the surface features were explored by the Japanese in 1937. A few artifacts were taken back to Tokyo and buried in storage, to which Andre later got access to produce some pictures. Occasional stores of excavations at Xanadu appear in Western papers, but the site is far from most tourist ways and far down the list of likely spots for Chinese archaeology.

Out trip was interesting not for what we found, but for the adventure of getting there and realizing we had seen a little part of the history of civilization. It is quite a distance from my first archaeology experience in Rocky Hill to the sparse plains of Inner Mongolia, but it left me very enthusiastic.

Tom Atkinson is currently helping at the Sun Tavern dig in Fairfield.