上都

Shangdu ("Upper Capital"), built by Kublai Khan in 1256 in today's Inner Mongolia, served as the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty alongside Dadu (大都, today's Beijing). Marco Polo described it in his Travels, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1816 poem "Kubla Khan" — "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree" — turned Xanadu (a Westernization of Shangdu) into a byword for imagined exotic paradise. The ruins are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The term 上都 is also used historically as a general name for the main capital in a dual-capital system (as opposed to 下都 the secondary capital), e.g. the Northern Qi and mid-Tang applications of the term.