Gansu Food & Traditional Cuisine

Gansu eats wheat and lamb, and its most famous dish is now eaten across China.

Lanzhou beef noodles — lanzhou lamian — are the province’s contribution to Chinese food and one of the country’s great breakfast dishes. Wheat dough is pulled by hand into noodles of a chosen thickness, from thick belt strips down to strands finer than string, and served in a clear beef broth with slices of beef, radish, coriander and chilli oil. It is a Hui Muslim dish, halal, and there are tens of thousands of shops bearing the name across China, most of them run by Gansu families.

The rest of the cuisine reflects the corridor: lamb and mutton, roasted, skewered or stewed; flatbreads baked on the wall of a clay oven; cumin, chilli and vinegar; and in the Tibetan south, yak, barley tsampa and butter tea.

Fruit is the oasis speciality — Dunhuang’s apricots, grapes and melons are famous, ripened by intense sun and a wide temperature swing.

Lanzhou beef noodles, eaten for breakfast and judged on the clarity of the broth as much as the noodles. The convention is one clear, two white, three red, four green, five yellow — clear broth, white radish, red chilli oil, green coriander and garlic sprout, yellow noodles — and a good shop will pull your noodles to order in front of you.

Hand-grasped lamb — shou zhua yang rou — boiled on the bone with almost no seasoning and eaten with the hands and a dish of salt, which is the Muslim northwest’s way of showing off the meat.

Niang pi, cold wheat-starch noodles with vinegar, chilli and garlic, eaten in summer.

Dunhuang donkey meat yellow noodles, a local speciality and better than that description sounds.

Sanpao tai, the Hui eight-treasure tea of green tea, rock sugar, longan, jujube, raisin and chrysanthemum, drunk from a lidded bowl.

Also: tsampa and yak butter tea in the Tibetan south; Bailan melons; and Linxia’s halal pastries.

Noodle shops open at dawn and are largely finished by mid-morning — beef noodles are breakfast here, not lunch, and a shop that is still busy at two in the afternoon is unusual. Queue, pay first, take the ticket to the counter and say what thickness you want.

Night markets at Dunhuang, Zhangye and Lanzhou sell skewers, flatbreads and fruit, and the Shazhou market at Dunhuang is aimed squarely at visitors but the food is good.

Halal is the default across much of the province. Pork is available but far less common than elsewhere in China, and many restaurants are Muslim-run.

Oasis fruit: buy apricots, melons and grapes at the roadside in season, and the dried versions year round.

In Tibetan areas, monastery guesthouses and family restaurants serve tsampa, momos and butter tea, which is salty rather than sweet and takes adjustment.

Gansu has a small but genuine wine industry and a very long history of viticulture along the corridor.

Grapes came east along the Silk Road, and Chinese records mention grape wine in the western regions from the Han period. The modern industry is centred on Wuwei and the eastern corridor, where the desert climate gives intense sun, negligible rain and a large day-to-night swing — conditions that suit vines well, though the winters are cold enough that vines must be buried each autumn and dug out in spring, which is laborious and limits the scale. Mostly Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, and the wines are improving.

Barley wine — chang — is the Tibetan drink in the south, lightly fermented and cloudy.

Baijiu is drunk at banquets, and the Hui Muslim population means alcohol is less universal here than elsewhere in China — many restaurants do not serve it at all.

Eight-treasure tea is the everyday drink, and the ritual around refilling it is part of Hui hospitality.