The bullet train takes less than an hour to cover the 240km from Harbin to Changchun. Or, rather, to a spot some way outside Changchun: the railway line is barely six months old, and the new station has been positioned so that the expanding city can grow up around it, which it is doing in a miasma of cranes and concrete.
"Changchun is very …" our guide Dongchao struggles for the word.
"Polluted?" I suggest. The sky was blue when we left Harbin. In Changchun, capital of China's motor industry, it's dirty grey and dust-heavy, with an eye-tingling waft of rubber.
"Yes!" he says. "Polluted."
We are here, my son Zac and I, to see the palace where Pu Yi, China's last emperor, ruled as a puppet of the Japanese before and during the second world war. And because the culture of hospitality runs deep in China, our former landlords have assigned Dongchao to show us around. He and a friend have given up their only day off to chauffeur us, guide us and treat us to Sichuan food.
We spend the next morning riding bicycles around a lakeside park, replete with bridges, pavilions, weeping willows and posing newlyweds, and hop on the sleeper to … Xanadu. Because you can't not visit Xanadu if you're in the area. Whatever your cultural reference point – Marco Polo, Coleridge, Frankie Goes to Hollywood or Olivia Newton-John – Xanadu, where Kubla Khan decreed his pleasure dome, is massive. Or, rather, it's massive if you're British.
"Shangdu!" I explain – repeatedly – using its modern name to various curious fellow-travellers as we trundle 1,000km across grassland. Blank stares. I have a stab at Kubla Khan's Chinese name. "Hubilai Sehan's palace!" No dice.
"It's very famous in England," I say feebly, pointing at the characters on the cover of my book. Even on the sodding train to Xanadu, not one person has heard of it.
Undaunted, we hop off at Sanggendalai, an unappealing village made only marginally exotic by a handful of wilting flowers, and into a shared taxi for Lanqi, a small industrial town dominated by a Kubla Khan statue Zac qualifies as "medium-sized".
But for eagles, tumbleweed, the grass-nesting birds that the eagles hunt and one enormous hare, we have Xanadu to ourselves.
I am "super-stoked", to use Zac-speak, that we can actually see some bricks and marble. He is less than whelmed. "You know that Coleridge poem?" he says aggrievedly as we dine in solitary splendour in our gigantic tourist hotel. "It goes on far too long. He should have stopped about a quarter of the way in."
Suck on that, Samuel Taylor.
• Theodora Sutcliffe blogs at EscapeArtistes.com. Zac blogs, rather less frequently, at Kidventurer.com
