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The food. That was my quick answer when a friend asked me what I was looking forward to most about my trip to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China’s far west, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I had first encountered the cooking of Xinjiang in 1993 while studying in Beijing. On the other side of my Beijing college’s north wall was an ethnic neighborhood of the Xinjiang Muslim people called the Uighurs (pronounced we-gur). All the foreign students minored in Uighur since their neighborhood was where we gathered to eat, drink and talk.
At tables in front of small restaurants and open stalls in this rundown part of west Beijing, we sat until late in the summer evenings, drinking beer and pots of the red-gold Uighur tea and eating round nan flat breads pulled straight from the ovens. The street was always deep in smoke and scents from the spiced lamb grilling on skewers at every stall.
Some of my fondest memories of Beijing were of eating food from Xinjiang. So it would have taken an outbreak of separatist revolution (of which there is constant rumbling in Xinjiang) to keep me from visiting the motherland of Uighur cuisine. My chance to travel to Xinjiang came in the form of a study tour of China’s Silk Road for K-12 teachers organized by Primary Source, a Boston-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting K-12 education about China
Uighur food truly reflects its people and place. The Uighurs are a Turkic people who follow Islam and are one of China’s largest minority groups. Some Uighurs live by herding livestock on the arid lands of the Tarim Basin and the Gobi Desert; others grow fruits and vegetables in the lush oases ringing the Tarim. The shepherds bring mutton to the Uighur table. The oasis farmers bring melons, tomatoes, onions and grains. Add hot aromatic elements such as cardamom, coriander, hot peppers, garlic, cilantro and cumin, and Uighur chefs have all the ingredients to create dishes that left me still thinking of them eight years later.
Our group’s first stop in Xinjiang was at the oasis city of Turpan. The city sits in a depression 450 feet below sea level. It is the second-lowest piece of land on Earth and China’s hottest location with August highs of 120 F. The oasis is surrounded by the Gobi Desert, but to the north the Tian Shan or Heavenly Mountains, with snow-capped peaks as high as 20,000 feet, rise out of the coarse, rocky desert. The Turpan people wisely take a long siesta to avoid the midday heat, emerging for an evening session of business around 4 p.m. As a result, the evening meal is late.
On our first night in Turpan, friends and I set out in quest of laghmen, the dish I most craved. Striking into restaurant districts and food markets in countries where you aren’t fluent in the language is always challenging. Complicating things, few Uighur restaurants would merit even one star in a AAA guide. American expectations of hygiene simply weren’t going to be met in most of the eateries in far western China. So as we walked through the food district, we applied the 3C’s to each establishment considered. The 3C’s are my rules for gastro-intestinal harmony while traveling afar, particularly when I neither can afford nor want to eat in gaudy tourist restaurants. Was the place clean, crowded and cheap? If it is clean and crowded you know it is popular and well-run and that people aren’t getting sick every time they eat there. If it is cheap, you know you’ll be getting good local food that the locals eat.
The Turpan food market was a spectacle: huge woks, some more than 3 feet across, filled with a pilaf of rice, carrots, raisins and onions; skewers of lamb sizzling in clouds of aromatic smoke; metal tubs filled with every imaginable part of a sheep, boiled, topped by the skull and the whole pile wrapped in a coil of sausage; and nan flatbreads baked into big rounds, small, plump bagels and other specialties.
Finding no place in the market that met the 3C’s, we bought nan in three shapes and did a comparison while we continued our search. Nan is made from unleavened wheat flour, kneaded and rolled out. It is touched with a combination of garlic, onions and oil, then slapped onto the sides of a vertical brick tandoori oven heated with wood. When it is finished, the baker pulls the bread from the side of the oven with a long metal hook.
But nan does not make a meal. Our quest for laghmen lasted well past 9 p.m. The place we chose was both clean and cheap, but failed on the second C. It was empty but for the proprietors, who sat with friends at the one outdoor table. There is, however, a corollary to C No. 2; can you watch them cook? This couple enthusiastically invited us into their clean, well-organized kitchen to watch the husband make our meal.
Lahgmen is a performance. The man started with a big lump of dough, which looked too big to handle. This went onto a large cutting board. His hands disappeared into the cloud of flour hovering above the board. Then both the lump and his hands emerged from the cloud and became entangled in a dance. He grabbed each end of the lump and flapped his arms to stretch the dough and make it thinner.
With a bold sweep of his hands, he brought the two ends together, in a plume of flour, doubling the noodle. Then four noodles, then eight. He stretched and tossed until he had pulled the lump into an armload of arm-length noodles. He cut off the ends and dropped the now loose noodles into a large pot of boiling water and set to work on the rest of the meal.
His wife, meanwhile, cleaned the outdoor table and brought out our bowls. She would fill the bowls inside, but she purposely brought the bowls out to us and while we watched, poured tea into them and rinsed them, tossing the tea onto the ground. This little ritual is a good omen for eating street food; tea has been boiled so it is safe to drink and to wash bowls with. The husband brought us our bowls, then sat down, eager to see our reaction. Laghmen has a spicy heat that affects the whole body, bringing a sweat to the brow and the back of the neck and flushing the face.
The cook could tell by our brow-wiping that we were enjoying ourselves. He laughed happily, coming closer to inspect our progress on the enormous bowls.
Our next stop was Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjiang. We spent the day exploring the area outside of the city, under the Tian Shan Mountains, now very close. As we returned to our hotel from our day’s adventures, all along the streets people riding bicycles, donkey carts or pickup trucks loaded with ovens, charcoal grills and coolers were headed in the same direction as us. When we arrived at the Hongfu Hotel, we discovered their destination. The street in front of the hotel was closed to traffic every night for a food market.
These state-licensed stalls had a level of hygiene and professionalism well-above that of the Turpan market. They met all the 3C’s. We had two blocks of choices.
With only one night to eat in the market, it was torturous to choose. Finally, we all split up, each heading for the stall that had caught his or her eye. The biggest surprises were the bright red-black crawfish and mounds of vibrant, hefty crabs as well as the skewers of whole fish, small birds, frogs and several creatures I couldn’t identify.
Twelve hours later, the street was once again bumper-to-bumper with motor traffic. The smoky, lamplit carnival of foods, faces, smells and calls had vanished like the Never Never Land of Uighur food. But as our group loaded onto our bus, off for the Tian Shan, everyone was smiling, still talking about the meals they had had in the market the night before. These were the smiles of the gastrointestinally harmonious, the smiles of travelers deep in the motherland of Uighur cuisine, steeped in the spices and aromas that haunt the markets of Xinjiang.
Ryan Bradeen is a history teacher at Bangor High School. He is on leave developing educational media about East Asian history. Photos and travelogues from his travels in China and Japan this summer as well as his newest educational projects on Xinjiang province can be found at www.monkeytree.org.
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