About Xilingol Television

Xilingol Television

Overview

Xilingol Television is the league-level television station of Xilingol League in central Inner Mongolia, based in Xilinhot and operated by the league's radio and television broadcaster within its converged media centre. Its channels broadcast in Mandarin and Mongolian for the league's banners and counties. Xilingol is classic Mongolian steppe — home to the Xilingol grasslands, Mongolian horse culture and the legacy of Abaga and Ujimqin horse breeding — and pastoral life, Naadam festivals and grassland ecology are central to the station's output.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. The documented position — league-level broadcaster based in Xilinhot, converged media centre, channels in Mandarin and Mongolian — and the pastoral, festival and ecological focus its record describes are the factual foundation of this profile.

Xilinhot and the league of the steppe

Xilingol League occupies central Inner Mongolia, a vast league of banners and counties administered from Xilinhot, the city from which the station broadcasts. Unlike the prefecture cities of the farming plains, a league is a territory of distance: banner towns, herding communities and mining and border settlements spread across an expanse of steppe that forms the main body of Inner Mongolia's natural grassland.

That scale defines the broadcasting task. Xilingol Television serves viewers for whom the nearest banner town may be hours away, whose working lives follow herds, seasons and weather across open grassland, and whose shared institutions — the league broadcaster among them — are part of what makes a scattered territory one community. Its channels, in Mandarin and Mongolian, are the common screen of the steppe league: league news, banner reporting, pastoral services and Mongolian culture carried from Xilinhot to the grassland.

Channels in Mandarin and Mongolian

The station's channels broadcast in Mandarin and Mongolian for the league's banners and counties. The bilingual service is fundamental, not supplementary: Mongolian is the language of the steppe's herding culture, its songs, epics and festivals, and a league broadcaster in Inner Mongolia serves a large Mongolian audience for whom Mongolian-language news and cultural programming is a public service in its own right.

Programming, as the station record frames it, centres on pastoral life, Naadam festivals and grassland ecology. Those three subjects together describe the league's year: the work of herding — lambing, shearing, haymaking, winter survival of livestock; the celebrations that interrupt it, above all Naadam; and the condition of the grassland itself, on which both work and celebration depend. Within the league's converged media centre, television is made alongside radio and new media by the same broadcaster, extending that bilingual, pastoral remit across platforms for audiences spread over enormous distances.

The Xilingol grassland and its biosphere reserve

The Xilingol grassland is one of China's major grasslands and one of its four great grassland regions — the most representative temperate true steppe, composed of bunch and rhizome grasses including Stipa and Leymus chinensis, and described by UNESCO as the most intact part of the eastern Asia subregion of the Eurasian steppe, with high value for conservation and scientific research.

At its heart lies the Xilingol Grassland Nature Reserve, covering some 580,000 hectares of meadow steppe, typical steppe, sandy steppe and valley wetland. The reserve was accepted as a member of UNESCO's World Biosphere Reserve network in 1987 — China's first grassland biosphere reserve — and its mosaic of grassland, forest, rivers, lakes and sandy land supports hundreds of vertebrate species and a celebrated flora of steppe plants. The Xilin River winds through the reserve country near Xilinhot, in the famous bends that have become the grassland's signature view.

Grassland ecology is therefore a hard-news beat for this station, not a nature documentary extra. Grazing policy, grassland restoration, drought and snow disaster, wildlife protection and the research presence drawn by the biosphere reserve all bear directly on herders' livelihoods. Xilingol Television reports on one of the world's great temperate grasslands as the people who live on it experience it: as pasture, as heritage and as home.

Yuan Shangdu: Kublai Khan's Xanadu

Xilingol holds one of world history's famous addresses. In Zhenglan Banner, in the south of the league, stand the ruins of Yuan Shangdu — Shangdu, the Upper Capital, known to the world as Xanadu. It was here that Kublai Khan established his capital before and as he founded the Yuan dynasty, ruling an empire that stretched across Eurasia from a palace city on the Jinlianchuan grassland. Shangdu served as the Yuan summer capital, seat of an imperial court that received envoys and travellers — Marco Polo among them in the accounts that made "Xanadu" a byword for splendour in Western literature.

The site of Yuan Shangdu is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, its palace foundations, walls and tombs preserved in the grassland that outlasted the dynasty. For Xilingol Television, Shangdu is the league's deepest historical story: proof that this steppe was once, quite literally, a capital of the world. Archaeology, conservation and cultural tourism at the ruins are continuing subjects, connecting the league's Mongolian present to its imperial past more directly than almost any other broadcaster's territory can.

Horse culture: Ujimqin, Abaga and the Horse Capital

If the grassland is Xilingol's body, the horse is its emblem. The league is famed for Mongolian horse breeding, above all the horses of the Ujimqin banners in the east and northeast and of Abaga Banner. Ujimqin horses, bred on what is widely praised as the finest grassland in Xilingol, and Abaga's horses, including its celebrated black horses, are part of a breeding heritage that made this steppe a supplier of mounts for centuries and a centre of Mongolian horse culture today.

Xilinhot has built modern institutions on that heritage, with major horse-culture facilities that have earned it the name "China Horse Capital." Racing and equestrian events on the grassland near the city draw riders from across Inner Mongolia. Among them, the Winter Mongolian Horse Super League — a cold-season competition series for Mongolian horses and their riders — reached finals reported with 319 riders in February 2026, a striking image of horse culture practised not as folklore but as living sport, in deep winter, by hundreds of competitors.

For the station, horse coverage spans all its registers: breeding and animal husbandry as agricultural news; racing as sport; the horse in song, festival and ceremony as culture. No subject better unites its bilingual audience, or better distinguishes a Xilingol broadcast from any other in China.

Naadam and the pastoral calendar

Naadam is the summit of the grassland year. The traditional Mongolian festival of the Three Games — wrestling, horse racing and archery — is celebrated across Xilingol's banners in summer, when the grass is high and the herds are fat, drawing whole communities to banner grounds for days of competition, dress, food and reunion. The league's Naadam gatherings are among its largest public events, and among the station's most demanding and most watched productions.

Around Naadam turns the pastoral calendar that structures the station's service programming: spring lambing and the risk of late snow; summer grazing and haymaking; autumn livestock sales; and winter — the season of dzud risk, when severe cold and snow can threaten herds across the steppe — with its warnings, relief and, in Xilinhot, its winter horse racing. Weather information on open grassland is livelihood information, and a league station that carries it in two languages performs a service no national channel can replicate.

Wulagai and Wolf Totem country

In the northeast of the league lies Wulagai, the farthest of Xilingol's famous grasslands from Xilinhot and, by many accounts, the most beautiful — a country of rivers, wetlands and rolling steppe. Wulagai achieved worldwide fame as the setting of Wolf Totem, the novel of a Beijing student sent to live with herders in the last years of the 1960s, and of the film adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, shot on this grassland.

Wolf Totem's themes — the wolf as the steppe's balancing predator, the tension between herding civilisation and the grassland's ecology, and the losses that came with settlement and extermination campaigns — are debated wherever Mongolian pastoral life is discussed. For Xilingol Television they are local material: the Wulagai grassland, its wolves and wetlands, and the question of how a herding culture lives with the ecosystem that made it. Tourism drawn by the novel and film adds a practical beat of visitor services and grassland protection.

Converged media across a vast league

Xilingol's broadcaster works within the league's converged media centre, producing television with radio and new media from one organisation. In a league of Xilingol's size, convergence is a practical necessity: a report from a distant banner — a Naadam, a snow warning, a conservation story from the biosphere reserve — can serve the television channels, radio and digital audiences from a single journey.

It also sustains the bilingual remit. Mongolian-language programming, costly to make for a dispersed audience, is strengthened when the same content can travel across the converged centre's platforms, keeping the language of the steppe present on the league's screens and phones alike.

Why Xilingol Television matters

Xilingol Television matters because it serves one of the world's emblematic pastoral territories: a UNESCO biosphere-reserve grassland, the ruins of Kublai Khan's Xanadu, the Ujimqin and Abaga horse country, and banner communities whose year runs from lambing to Naadam to winter racing. From Xilinhot, in Mandarin and Mongolian, the league station carries news, pastoral services and Mongolian culture across the central Inner Mongolian steppe — a broadcaster whose subject, in the end, is the grassland itself and the people who have lived by it for a thousand years.