The Camel Milk King of China

I originally wrote this story in 2017 after a trip to Xinjiang the previous year. It appeared on the Roads and Kingdoms website, and was part of their “Dispatched” column of “original longform reporting, curated by Anthony Bourdain.” I’ve edited the original down from more than 4,000 words to this 2021 version, and appended an update at the bottom about what’s happened in the company since I first visited.

***

“Drink one more shot and I’ll give you the antidote,” Chen Gangliang, the founder of China’s only camel milk company, slurs at me. We are in a Xinjiang desert but eating fish, harvested from the area’s two freshwater lakes. The plates of freshwater pike, tiny fried silver fish, and fish dumplings have been cleared, and now we are deep into the baijiu. It’s still light outside in this dusty town; in summer, the sun sets around 11pm.  The restaurant is a concrete box on the outside but fancy inside, a hidden entertaining spot in Fuhai, a small city that is ethnically Kazakh and primarily based around the mumin culture of the nomadic Kazakh herders.

The baijiu stinks of regret but we are a long ways past the first shot of the night, and the entire evening —goaded on by the camel milk princess, toasted by senior managers in short sleeve dress shirts with shoe-polish black comb-overs, in a fog of cigarettes and new friendship — is starting to seem like a set up for this exact moment. Properly shit-faced, improperly enthusiastic, Chen and I finish the shot.

Silver cans of Wang Yuan camel milk appear on the table. They are supposed to erase the effects of half a bottle of moonshine with their super-nutrition. The cure is so effective, Chen says, that it turns his salesmen into superhuman drinkers. He doesn’t allow his staff to bring camel milk to restaurants, he says, because they would outdrink everyone else. There was no such ban on our dinner. Two cases of milk sat against a wall.

I pull the tab on top of the silver can and chug. It tastes mostly of dairy, with a slightly animal whiff. It is not unpleasant. It is not alcoholic. And it doesn’t work.

***

Twenty-four hours earlier we had landed in Altay, a tiny triangle of extreme northwestern China, where the borders of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia meet. Everyone is here for the zhuanchang, a massive migration of tens of thousands of animals, when herders move their camels, cows, sheep, and horses from the lower, spring pastures to the alpine grasses higher up the mountains.

These days, the zhuanchang has been at least partially co-opted as a tourist attraction, and the hotel was buzzing with middle-aged photographers in vests who had paid dearly for the opportunity. The “official” start date on our trip was set for the day after our arrival, and many farmers were forced to haul their animals to the starting point by truck to make it in time for the spectacle, cheapening, if not completely defeating, the original spirit of the tradition.

The next day we made the two-hour drive from Altay to Fuhai, out of the pine forests and green fields and into the desert scrubland that stretches for hundreds of miles to the south, broken only by Ulungur Lake and the Black Mountain range. Thousands of animals trotted along the roads as we passed.

***

For most of its recent history, fish have been the most valuable resource in this arid county, with winter ice-fishing the main excitement. Camels were simply a transportation tool for carrying goods, Chen tells me.

A decade ago, he estimates, there were 3,000 camels in the whole of Fuhai county. Their milk was drunk as a medicine, given to the elderly, children, sick people, and important guests, according to according to Hayrat Haleymolla, the chief of the Kazakh Pharmaceutical Research Institute, and an important part of traditional Kazakh medicine.

(Kazakh medicine is split into two branches: doctors who deal with bone fractures, and the “wood-and-leaf” doctors who deal with every other type of disease, all of which they believe to be contagious, and treatable by herbs and barks, as well as camel milk.)

Today, there are at least 20,000 milking camels in Fuhai and the camel milk industry is booming. Xinjiang Wang Yuan Camel Milk Co Ltd is the main reason.

We head out early in the morning to see the process. After miles of scrubby desert, a pair of yurts and a small dust cloud appear as the camels kick up dirt while waiting for us.

It’s the beginning of summer and the camels are ugly. They are shedding their thick winter coats in ragged patches and their humps flop over to one side, a sign that their reserves of fat are depleted. They buck and bay, and groan a deep and sad sound, like Chewbacca; they want to be milked.

The camels cluster together like sheep, and the husband pulls one of the females out by the rope threaded through her nose. He leads her into a set of parallel metal bars stuck into the brown earth, an informal milking stall that looks more like playground equipment than an industrial dairy operation, and wipes her udders with warm water.

His wife, in a purple velvet dress and white scarf, wheels over the milking machine—a camel-specific model designed by Wang Yuan in collaboration with a local university—attaches the suction cups, and flicks a switch.

Thick, white milk streams into a stainless-steel container, but not for long. Where a cow might produce 15 liters, a camel will only give one.

The herders catch, milk, and repeat, eventually straining the fresh milk into a second container, one that will go to Wang Yuan and be weighed, inspected and credited to their boss’s account.

Satisfied to see that it is indeed possible to milk a camel, we head over to the yurts with camel milk princess. Bahar Guli, or Spring Flower, is a fine-boned and light-skinned beauty in land of strong, tan women who has become a celebrity spokeswoman after a pure camel-milk diet saved her from a wasting sickness.

She is dainty in her mustard-colored pants and delicate top, and plays the part of urbanite host well, fussing over the tea and snacks laid out for us. She looks exactly as she did in the advertisement in the magazine on the plane.

The yurts are dusty and white on the outside, held in place with taut ropes anchored into the ground. Inside, they are resplendent, a million shades of crimson, carpeted from the walls down. Wooden ribs used to make the skeleton bend from the curved roof down to the ground in a symmetrical dome shape. A generator cranks out electricity.

Nuts, dried fruit, and camel milk in every possible preparation sit on the table: fresh salted camel curd, hard and dry nuggets of that same curd, yogurt, fresh, fermented and dried into sheets. Until Wang Yuan was founded, this was the only way camel milk lasted past the first few days of freshness. A vacuum flask of warm camel milk sits at the end of the table. It is a proper Kazakh feast, passed off as just a few snacks among friends.

A man in nice slacks, a polo shirt, and an embroidered velvet prayer hat joins us in the yurt. He had been standing outside during the milking, supervising, but he wasn’t with our party from Wang Yuan. He was too clean to be a herder but too interested in the details to be a stranger.

Over a bowl of zhuancha, a rough and salty milk tea made with butter and camel milk, we learn that this is Jengis Tohan, no longer a herder or sheep farmer, but a camel-milk entrepreneur. In 2011, when Wang Yuan was founded, he used his savings and sold his flock of sheep to buy 75 camels, back when the females were cheap. Things have gone well. He’s now up to 90 camels and planning a jump to 200. The female camels are now valued at about 20,000 RMB, a sevenfold increase from when he bought them. In a county where the per capita income is less than 10,000 RMB per year, camel milk has been good to him.

From here, the milk we’ve seen will be collected by one of the roving Wang Yuan tanker trucks, which roam up to 500 miles away from the Fuhai factory, collecting milk from all sizes of milking operations. The collected milk is then put through the proprietary Wang Yuan process. This is crucial. The rarity of camel milk in the past and the abundance of preserved products that we were offered go hand in hand. Without refrigeration, the traditional herders had to drink the milk fresh, or preserve it.

Wang Yuan’s breakthrough, as Chen tells us later, is an enzymatic process that disables the unnamed molecules or proteins that cause camel milk to spoil. It’s only here in China, of all the camel milk-producing countries across the Middle East and Africa, that anyone has been able to break this code. “The cans say ‘Best within six months’,” Chen tells us, “but that’s just to play it safe. This milk will last up to two years.”

And with that, what once was a highly regional and limited product has suddenly become available across China, sold in specialty Wang Yuan shops in packs of six. Sales are fastest in Guangdong.

From 2011, when the company opened, to 2016, Wang Yuan’s revenues have grown to RMB 230 million. They have more than 500 outlets, with locations in every province in China except Tibet. They recently added a RMB 90 million research and development extension to their factory in Fuhai, and a new factory in Inner Mongolia is in trial operations.

Wang Yuan is the biggest employer in Fuhai county, and to hear the CEO and local camel farmers tell it, the best thing to happen to the county in decades. Ten years ago, herders were living below the poverty line, making 3,000 RMB a year, and there was a serious social problem with alcohol and drunks freezing to death during the brutal winters. The company had done more for the growth of per capita income than any government project, and some 340 families were now raising camels, some bought with subsidies from the government, making ten times their previous annual income.

“It’s not like cows,” Chen told us. “One squeeze, one fen.” He mimicked milking a cow. “With camels, it’s one squeeze, one kuai. Another squeeze, two kuai.”

We go out to lunch at a bare-bones pilaf restaurant, where the options are rice, rice with Altay lamb, and extra lamb. When it comes time to pay, the waitress says two words — Wang Yuan — and refuses our money.

We sit with Chen as he outlines his first encounter with camels in Dubai in the early 2000s through years of visits to India, Mongolia, the Middle East and Africa, to see camels and the culture that surrounds them. To his surprise, there was barely a market for anything but meat, and even then it was small. Finally, after years of research, he commissioned a study to analyze the various proteins in the milk, looking for one that would be particularly well-suited to the cosmetics industry. It didn’t work.

Chen is a slight man with hawkish features, and he comes up to the chest of most of the herders. But decades in manufacturing near Shanghai, where he is originally from, have made him business savvy, and eventually he found his way to Fuhai and the Kazakhs, who already had a small population of camels.

After the cosmetics failure, he took his cue from the Kazakhs and Mongolians around him, who prized the milk’s medicinal properties, and decided to pursue milk. But with villages up to 200 miles apart in some cases, collection and transportation was a problem. Keeping the milk fresh would be nearly impossible.

That pushed him to develop a processing system that he says disables the molecules in the milk that trigger spoilage, allowing the milk to stay shelf-stable for 24 months, without destroying the bacteria that make the milk so beneficial in the first place. He is up-to-date on the science surrounding the microbiome and recent research suggesting it might be a factor in Alzheimer’s — another disease he claims his camel milk will help treat. He was part of a team in 2013 that sequenced the Bactrian camel genome and published its findings in the British journal Nature.

Some publications report that the milk increases the body’s productions of antioxidant enzymes and may have a positive effect for people with food allergies, Type 1 diabetes, hepatitis B and other autoimmune diseases. The largest market in the U.S. are the parents of autistic children, who believe it has a calming effect on their kids.

At 62, Chen might reasonably be retired, but instead, he’s here, in Fuhai, 2,000 miles from home, checking in on our stomachs after our first can of the milk (the first two hours often make people’s bellies rumble) and explaining the cultural, economic, and medical background of camel milk. He tells us he’s removed 70 percent of the “camel flavor”: enough to make it palatable, in his calculation, but not enough to confuse it with cow’s milk. Indeed, the taste, on the milder side of goat milk, is the least interesting aspect of Wang Yuan’s entire operation.

On our second night, the banquet was held in a herder’s modest home, outside of town. The same embarrassment of dried fruits and dairy products were laid out for our arrival, and off to the side, on the couch, I could see Wang Yuan’s senior management starting to remove the packaging from the baijiu bottles. By this point, the CEO had given up his conceit about camel milk inhibiting the effect of alcohol, and he leaned over and whispered to me, “We need a strategy.”

He came up with an elaborate toasting ritual, using his god-like status among these herders to force toast after toast on them, until their eyes turned red and the room got loud. My assistant, seated to the CEO’s left, survived by pretending to take a sip of tea after each toast, and then coyly spitting the baijiu back into the tea. I drank it straight and tried to eat as much as possible.

The better part of a roast sheep arrived on the table and the snacks were cleared away. A round and jolly camel herder named Jiger Hurmet did the honors. He pulled out a long pocket knife and divided up the meat of the sheep’s head with the practiced script of a salesman.

“To the beautiful woman over here, an ear, so that she may better hear and understand her husband,” he started. “To our new singing friends over here, the meat from the upper palate, so that you may use it to speak the truth about us.”

Until it’s divided up like this, you don’t realize how many different types of meat there are on a sheep’s head. I think I was given part of a cheek. I’m not clear how it was supposed to benefit me.

By this point, it didn’t matter. The night was getting sloppy and camel milk was not going to stop it. Music helped. The Kazakhs are famous for their singing, and out of nowhere, a dombra, a Kazakh lute, appeared.

Resting it against his ample belly, the intoxication fell away and the table fell under the trance of Hurmet’s booming voice and folk songs, which carried through the house and out into the courtyard.

Halfway through, he made a solemn speech about a song that was dedicated to CEO Chen, the man whose company had single-handedly raised his standard of living and brought him to the feast that night. He broke into a mournful verse and began strumming both strings in rapid succession. It was a sad story, a fable of a young camel that was separated from its family, lost in the desert, a parable about never being able to go home again.

When he finished, the living room erupted in applause, and Hurmet immediately stood up to offer Chen another shot of baijiu. The night continued on like this, getting hazier and hazier until finally it was time to go. Hurmet dragged me out of the house, through the courtyard and into the backyard, a pitch-black area lit from above by the thousands of stars in the sky, the type of view you only get far from a city. He pulled me into a big bear hug and slurred something into my ear about Chen’s largesse. He was deep into the baijiu. He, of all people, was going to need some camel milk.

***

Since writing this article in 2017, Wang Yuan’s sales have increased dramatically, to 800 million RMB in 2020; the company’s 2021 sales forecast anticipates a 50% increase to more than a billion RMB. They now have about 2,000 stores across China and the price of a female camel has continued to appreciate. It currently stands at around 25,000 RMB. Bahar Guli has married and moved out of Fuhai. She is no longer the camel milk princess.

Photos: Jia Li