At seven o’clock on Sunday morning, the first batches of crisp, golden nan are being hooked out of tandoors. Snack sellers are lighting fires under their stoves, setting up cauldrons of soup to boil, and chopping piles of colorful vegetables and hunks of fatty mutton. The rising sun spills through poplar trees, marking out long fingers of light on the ground. Other vendors arrive, steering donkey carts laden with produce or driving flocks of bleating sheep into the great market enclosure. Hungry after an early start, I buy some nan from one of the bakers. The hot, onion-speckled crust yields to fluffy white dough: It is magnificently tasty.
By noon, the field is hot and dusty and seething with people and livestock. Buyers squeeze the flesh of sheep, haggle over cows, donkeys, and goats. Alongside, the snack stalls are doing a roaring trade. Young men in embroidered caps pull noodle dough into lengths that they swing and loop in the air, stretching it into strands as fine and even as spaghetti. A baker with an ear-splitting yell invites customers to taste his piping hot samsa, small mutton and onion pastries that he plucks off the curved walls of his tandoor. The crowds mill around, talking and shouting in a guttural yet melodic tongue that sounds something like Turkish. The air is filled with the punchy scent of cumin from sizzling kebabs.
This is China, but it doesn’t feel like China. Kashgar, the legendary Silk Road town whose Sunday market draws trade from the surrounding countryside, lies in the desert region of Xinjiang, at the westernmost tip of the country. This vast area, occupying a sixth of China’s territory, is home to a myriad of ethnic groups, including the Turkic Uyghur people, the largest minority, as well as Tajiks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Russians, and, increasingly, Han Chinese. The bleached wastes of the Takla Makan Desert dominate the landscape of Xinjiang, but here in Kashgar the sands give way to the lush green of an oasis.
More than 2,000 years ago, trade began along the perilous overland routes between China and Eurasia that later became known as the Silk Road. Kashgar was just one of a string of thriving oasis towns on the road to the glittering Tang dynasty capital Chang’an (where modern Xi’an now sits). After the decline of the Mongol Empire and the opening of the sea routes in the late 15th century, the region lost its vitality, and many of the towns were abandoned.
The modern center of Kashgar resembles any other Chinese city, with wide avenues, karaoke bars, and bland tiled buildings. (The Chinese have laid claim to this region for centuries, and in recent years have stamped its urban centers with their distinctive brand of modernization.) But if you escape into the narrow streets and bazaars of the old Muslim town, you’ll find yourself in another world altogether. Here, coppersmiths beat their gleaming metal into various cooking pots and kettles. Knife merchants watch over rows of bejeweled daggers, while shopkeepers sit cross-legged in the doors of dim Aladdin’s caves hung with carpets or antique porcelain and trinkets. Dark alleys shimmer with multicolored silks, shot through with gold thread or spangled with sequins.
Somewhere in the winding alleys behind the Id Kah Mosque, in the heart of Kashgar, Abdel Sopel, a Uyghur shopkeeper, invites me into his home. The wooden door opens into an airy courtyard, where fruit trees and flowers grow in terra-cotta pots and a grapevine curls overhead. Sopel’s children are playing on the carpeted platform that runs along two sides of the yard, while his sister, Alipasha, and his wife, Merpel, are preparing noodles for lunch.
Hand-pulled noodles, or läghmän, are a Uyghur staple. “We eat them every single day,” says Alipasha, as she tosses freshly cut vegetables into a wok on the coal-fired stove in the yard, where a little mutton is already sizzling in oil. There are brilliant red peppers and tomatoes, green chiles and beans, purple-speckled radishes and ivory potatoes, simmered together into a colorful sauce.
Male professional noodlemakers may dazzle the crowds in the markets with their dancing hands and extravagant artistry, but Uyghur women make läghmän much more simply at home. Merpel rolls her dough of flour and water into long sausages on an oiled board, and then coils them around the circular base of an oiled tin, where they are covered and left to rest. Later, she stretches each length of oiled noodle paste into loops on the board, and leaves them to rest once again. When her potful of water is boiling, she takes the end of one long, looped strand of dough from the board and winds it gently into a skein around her hands. She then slaps the skein firmly against the board several times to stretch the noodles, and tosses them into the pot to cook, a portion at a time.
Soon we are sitting on the carpets and drinking cardamom-scented tea that Alipasha has poured into bowls from an engraved copper teapot. And then Merpel brings each of us, in turn, a bowl of springy fresh noodles covered in vegetable-and-mutton sauce. She and Alipasha are dressed in typical Uyghur style, with long skirts and long-sleeved tops in flamboyant colors, floaty headscarves and golden jewelry, while Abdel Sopel and his father wear Muslim caps. They all have Caucasian features. And as we sit there together on the carpets, Central Asian–style, and my hosts talk softly in the Turkic Uyghur language, it is only the chopsticks we use to eat that remind me we are still in China.
The Uyghurs, like the Italians, are pasta specialists, and their geographical location on the ancient bridge between China and Europe is strikingly apparent in their pasta cookery. Their hand-pulled noodles connect them with the Muslims who live scattered across northern China, and their boiled dumplings are essentially the same as those made in every northern Chinese home, except that they are stuffed with mutton rather than pork. Yet their westward leanings are just as compelling. The steamed manta dumplings, filled with mutton and onion and sold at clamorous street stalls, resemble those made by the Uzbeks and the Afghans (similar words are used for dumplings as far west as Turkey). And if you look closely at the little chuchurä dumplings, served in broth and stuffed with alfalfa greens or mutton, you’ll see that they are wrapped just like Italian tortellini.
One Kashgar noodle seller boasts that the people of Xinjiang make some 70 different varieties of pasta. The various types of läghmän, which can be pulled round or flat, thick or fine, are just the beginning. In the backstreets of Kashgar, I’ve seen Uyghur men snip macaroni-size bites from strings of dough (dingding somän), and pluck squares from a long ribbon of pasta and toss them through the air into the wok (somän). I’ve watched them pinch the paste into coarse ribbons with wavy edges, or roll it into sheets which are cut into strips once they’ve become dry as leather. And in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, I’ve shared with a group of Kazakhs the most famous Kazakh pasta dish, silky hand-cut sheets served with boiled mutton (narin chöp).
After leaving Sopel’s house, I wander through a clutter of donkey carts and a haze of kebab smoke into a teahouse where Uyghur men gather in the afternoons. Potted plants and a hanging birdcage flank the veranda, where they sit on carpeted platforms that look like old-fashioned bedsteads, smoking hand-rolled tobacco leaves and breaking their nan into bowls of tea. Some unwrap little envelopes of spices, slipping in ground pepper or safflower. I sit among them, eating fresh figs and pomegranates, and before long fall into conversation with Mehmeti Yimin, a lively man in his fifties with a charming manner and sparkling eyes. He tells me he plays in a troupe of musicians who perform at Uyghur weddings.
“There’s one tomorrow—come with me,” he says.
We meet at the teahouse the following day, and soon he is leading me deep into the old city, which calls to mind Marrakech far more than Beijing. The scents of rice and mutton mingle around the entrance to the bridegroom’s house, where a few men are preparing food in an ad hoc kitchen. A vast wok is filled with the essential wedding food, polo, a rich pilaf made with pearly rice, chunks of mutton, and strips of yellow carrot; in another wok a hot-and-sour vegetable stew is simmering.
On an upstairs veranda, Yimin and his band set up their instruments and begin to sing and play, filling the air with rousing, passionate music. Little children run up and down the stairs, and soon a girl has brought me a bowl of polo, to eat with my fingers in the traditional way. (The Chinese call this dish, which is Central Asian in name and style, zhua fan, hand-eaten rice.) “It’s very heavy and rich,” warns Yimin as he sips his tea between songs, “so you should never eat it in the evening, or you won’t sleep soundly.”
As the musicians play on in the bridegroom’s house, a young girl leads me through the lanes to the home of the bride. Surrounded by her girlfriends, she is posing for photographs in a white, Western-style wedding dress, her hands patterned with henna, her hair speckled with glitter. In the next room, the older women of the family sit around a tablecloth on the floor, feasting. They help themselves to deep-fried pastries served with sweetened kaymak cream; almonds, sultanas, and dried apricots; mutton samsa; spongecakes and dough twists; watermelon slices; and towering heaps of nan.
Nan is the staff of life in Uyghur culture and has an almost sacred significance. In the distant past it sustained the Silk Road merchants on their desert journeys. Today, it is used in wedding ceremonies, when the imam invites the bride and groom to share a piece of nan dipped in salted water as a sign of their pledged fidelity, as well as at the wedding feasts. “You can’t have a wedding without nan,” Yimin tells me.
In every village, the circular nan are piled up on stalls along the roads. Some are as wide as dinner plates, pricked into patterns of concentric circles with a gadget made of chicken quills. These large nan serve not only as food but as platters, soaking up the juices of a handful of skewered kebabs or a pile of steaming mutton dumplings. Other nan are smooth and golden, and resemble bialys. And then there are the nan brushed with chopped onion or scattered with sesame seeds, stained green with chopped chives or sweetened with sugar. Fresh from the tandoor they are irresistible. The Uyghurs share their nan-baking craft with a swath of food cultures across South and Central Asia, from India to Afghanistan, Iran to Turkey.
Sitting outside Intizar restaurant the following evening, I look on as a young man tends the grills in a haze of smoke and spices, assembling skewers of raw meat marinated in salt and egg, and sprinkling the kebabs with chile and cumin as he fans them with a wooden board. My kebabs, when they come, are juicy and fragrant, the chunks of lean meat threaded with morsels of delicious fat from the tail of the sheep. Like the Iranians and Central Asians, the Uyghurs prize the meat of the fat-tailed sheep, whose football-size lumps of tail fat hang, obscenely exposed, above the butchers’ stalls in the markets. Whole sheep are slaughtered and cooked for the major Muslim festivals; in the night markets, they are also roasted in tandoors or boiled up with secret-recipe spices into aromatic stews.
The manager of Intizar, a mustached Uyghur called Egiber, stops on his rounds for a chat. He is jovial and flirtatious, assuring me of the aphrodisiac properties of his pigeon and chickpea soup. When his friends pass by, he greets them with an almost Mediterranean warmth, clasping their hands in his own. Yet again, I find it hard to believe I’m in China: it’s only the bilingual menu, where Chinese characters sit alongside the Arabic Uyghur script, that brings me back to reality.
Intizar is one of a number of restaurants offering traditional Uyghur food in more comfortable surroundings than you find in the streets. Much more ambitious is the Traditional Garden of the Western Regions, on the outskirts of town, which was opened in 2004 by a group of local entrepreneurs. A great complex of orchards, ponds, arbors, and pavilions, it is laid out and decorated in traditional Uyghur style. The main building has a spectacular carved-wood facade; inside, a banqueting room with walls of wedding-cake plasterwork can seat a hundred on cushions and rugs around a long table on the carpeted floor. Smaller parties can hire a pavilion, or dine on a carpeted platform under the fruit trees. There’s even an al fresco dining area before a stage set for performances of Uyghur music.
“Kashgar is an ancient city at the heart of the Silk Road, so we have many visitors from China and abroad,” says Abubakri, one of the restaurant’s owners, “but we didn’t have a single really good restaurant. That’s why we opened this place, to show the whole world the excellence of Uyghur culture and food, and the great hospitality of the Uyghur people.”
The restaurant specializes in Uyghur cooking, augmented by a certain amount of Chinese fare, and can serve a thousand people at a time in its scattered halls and gardens. We take our dinner at a table laid outside on a brick terrace, with a view of willow groves, pear trees, and vines. We begin, as always, with tea, flavored with a potpourri of spices including cardamom, pepper, cinnamon, and cloves. Our samsa are made in the traditional tandoor, but they are scattered with sesame seeds and the meat is unusually succulent. The kava manta (steamed dumplings filled with pumpkin, mutton, and onion) are sweet and juicy; and the läghmän are served in an attractive dark-glazed bowl. Lanterns and candles are lit as the sun sets, and we chat and drink tea into the night.
Beyond Kashgar, to the southwest, are nomadic lands near the borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. For my last few days in the region, I head out there with a Uyghur driver, Hassan, a cassette of Uyghur dance music on the stereo, a watermelon and a few nan stowed in the back, filling the car with their seductive aromas of onion and sesame. We rattle along through the villages, stirring up a cloud of dust in our wake. To the right is a long jagged spine of mountains, their snowy peaks shining metal-white in the sun.
Soon we are driving along a riverbed where shaggy-coated camels munch on tufts of grass, and the Pamir mountains rise in pink-brown folds to their snowy summits. Shepherds tend great herds of goats, and clear lakes reflect the azure sky. Further on, there are yaks grazing on wide grasslands, where Kyrgyz herders have pitched their summer yurts. We visit friends of Hassan’s along the way: a Kyrgyz woman who invites us into her yurt for bowls of tangy yogurt, Tajik farmers who welcome us into their old courtyard house and ply us with home-baked nan and salted, milky tea.
When the sun is low in the sky we reach the last outpost of the old Chinese empire, the ancient town of Tashkurghan. We leave the car on the road and hike up to the deserted “stone fortress,” an ancient, crumbling edifice of earth overlooking a marshy plain. This was once a stopping-point for Silk Road caravans; now, traders and travelers rest here before crossing on the Karakorum Highway into Pakistan. To the east, some 2,000 miles away, lies Beijing, the Chinese capital; Baghdad is closer. I breathe in the clean mountain air and look toward the border, dreaming of tea and chopsticks, noodles and dumplings, kebabs and rice. This region is, as it has been for millennia, a melting pot of cultures, a way station between China and the West. And nowhere are the traces of those ancient paths of trade and migration more apparent than in its food.