A Rich and Delicious History

Renowned food writer Fuchsia Dunlop celebrates the ancient heritage and modern variety of the versatile noodle

In the kitchen of Master Wei, her restaurant in London, Chef Guirong Wei extends her arms, stretching the strip of dough into a long ribbon before thwacking it down on the bench twice, then splitting it down the middle and casting the rippling length into a great wok full of boiling water. Drained after a brief boiling, the noodle is curled in a serving bowl, topped with chopped garlic and flakes of chili, and completed with a flourish of sizzling-hot oil.

Biang biang noodles, named for the sound they make when slapped on the board, are one of the famous street snacks of Xi’an, the capital of China’s northern Shaanxi province and home to the Terracotta Army. Guirong is the first Chinese chef to have featured in the Netflix series Chef’s Table and has become the noodles’ new champion in London and the world.

Until recently, Chinese noodles were mainly known in the West by the Cantonese dish chow mein, a takeaway favorite of golden egg noodles stir-fried with beansprouts and other shredded ingredients. Large numbers of Cantonese people emigrated to the West from the 19th century onward and created the adapted Chinese cuisine that became popular in the United States and Europe, but they were southerners whose staple food was rice, which made them unlikely flagbearers for Chinese noodle culture.

The real heartlands of Chinese noodle-making have always been in the north of the country, where people eat little rice but grow and grind wheat, fashioning the flour into pastas, breads, and dumplings. Yet it wasn’t until the early 21st century that migrants from the noodle-making northern provinces, like Guirong Wei, began to introduce their culinary traditions to the outside world.

The Chinese have been making noodly foods – essentially pieces of wheat-flour dough boiled in water – for around 2,000 years. Before then, they steamed or boiled their cereal grains, including millet, rice, and wheat, and ate them whole, as rice eaters often do today. But sometime around the beginning of the first millennium CE, they acquired the technology from Central Asia to use rotating millstones to grind stubborn wheat into silky flour. They also began to use a new word, bing, to describe all kinds of foods made from doughs mixed from flour and water. Some of the early bing were flatbreads, but the Chinese also became avid eaters of steamed and boiled dumplings and soupy noodles.

According to a popular legend, Marco Polo brought noodles from China to Italy in the late 13th century. However, while the Chinese are thought to be the world’s earliest noodle makers, there were forms of pasta in parts of Italy some two centuries before Marco Polo’s return home; they may originally have arrived with Arab traders and have Arab or Persian origins.

These days, noodles are eaten as a staple food across a whole swathe of northern China. In Xinjiang in the far west, the Uyghur people form long noodles (läghmän) by stretching out coils of dough, and serve them with sauces of lamb, tomatoes, and vegetables. In the Chinese capital, Beijing, a similar technique is used to make the local specialty, zhajiang noodles, tossed with fresh vegetables and chopped pork in a heady fermented sauce. Everywhere in between, doughs are pulled, sliced, pinched, and scraped to make myriad other varieties.

But nowhere is more celebrated for its noodle arts than Shanxi province. In Shanxi Huiguan, a restaurant in the Shanxi provincial capital of Taiyuan, you can watch chefs in open kitchens shape and cook their noodle foods. One uses scissors to snip thin strips from a ball of dough into boiling water; another holds a shallow dish filled with a wet dough above a wok and uses a sharpened stick to flick strips from the lip of the dish into the water.

Southwest of Shanxi is the adjacent province of Shaanxi, where Chef Guirong Wei first acquired a passion for food from her grandmother as a small child living in a rural village. At the tender age of 13, she moved to Xi’an to earn a living – the first move in a journey that would see her become the first female head chef in the Shaanxi capital, and eventually set up her first restaurant in London with her husband, Song Yong.

Guirong’s meteoric rise to success may make her the most high-profile example of a chef bringing regional Chinese cooking to Western palates. But over recent years, a huge variety of Chinese noodle specialties have appeared across the globe, from the drama of Lanzhou lamian – pulled in midair from a twist of dough to a skein of thin noodles and served in a broth with stewed beef – to Datong knife-scraped noodles, which are slender wriggles shaved from a stiff block of dough with a sharpened curve of metal.

It’s all come a long way from the chow mein that we have been familiar with for many years, but, excitingly, the world is still only peeping through the keyhole into the inventive world of Chinese noodles.

In November 2024, The New York Times named Land of Plenty, the original edition of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan cookbook, as one of the 25 most influential cookbooks from the past 100 years.