Qinghai’s Noodle Industry is Massive. This Man Started It.
Han Lu steps out of the Buick and into his past. The village of Upper Woliga is silent and empty but for a red construction crane and a cow grazing an overgrown patch of land. We have driven to this remote corner of Qinghai province, two hours south of Xining, to see the tiny settlement that Han left more than five decades ago, pioneering a path out of poverty that tens of thousands of residents would later follow. Han was migrant zero, the trailblazer of the Noodle Trail, and it would take him not just out of the high brown hills and deep ravines of Hualong County, but propel him out of China and turn him into a local noodle celebrity.
Today, more than 1/3 of the county's 300,000 residents work in the hand-pulled beef noodle industry. If you've eaten la mian in China, the odds are high you've had a brush with Hualong's noodle workers, spread out over nearly 350 cities across the country. The sign might say "Lanzhou" but the staff is often from villages like Upper Woliga in Hualong, where little but buckwheat and potatoes grow in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau. The county alone — to say nothing of Lanzhou and Gansu — is responsible for 32,000 shops across China, and its la mian industry worth approximately 20 billion RMB.
Han, 68, is dressed in a dark blue tracksuit, with a white hat matching his clean white trainers and white chin beard. He has an athletic bounce to his step and an easy smile as he walks us down the road to see the site of his childhood home. The village is dotted with crumbling mud-walled homes, like the one he grew up in, among the newer courtyards, built with noodle money and topped with glassed-in terraces.
Life was grueling, he'd told us the night before; of the 12 children his mother gave birth to, only six survived, and the remaining six didn't have it easy. By five years old, they were in charge of taking the family's cows, sheep and horses out to the grassland to graze. He left school at age seven, when the classes, following the political trend of the time, became study sessions of Mao quotes. By the time he was ten, he had already been drafted into a village production team, doing the work of an adult. Electricity wouldn't come until the end of the 1970s.
Han's father was a cultured man, having graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy started by the region's Muslim warlord, Ma Bufang, and though life made him a farmer, he still listened closely to the politics of the day, picked up on a tiny radio. A young Han Lu followed along, and picked up the habit with his own small radio. He was a teenager, sent 800 kilometers away to Yushu to work on a road construction crew, when the radio brought news that would change his life: the Gang of Four, a political clique that followed Mao's death, had been smashed. His construction crewmates didn't understand the bigger meaning but to Han the signal was clear. The market economy would come back; he could do business. After a year and a half on the road crew, he quit. There was no explicit permission to travel and sell but, then again, no one stopped him. After the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s, Han felt that for the first time in his life, there was hope.
In those early years, he tried it all. He sold cordyceps picked in Qinghai to traders in Guangzhou. When he was robbed in the Guangzhou market, he began shuttling military uniforms between Lanzhou and Yushu. He sold "foreign socks", an 80s trend. Finally, he realized there was a strong market for ration stamps, which were being phased out in Qinghai but commanded a premium in Tibet. He went to Lhasa.
Han, like many people from Hualong, is a Hui Muslim and during those trips to Tibet, he couldn't find anywhere to eat halal food. Always on the lookout for new business opportunities, he decided he'd solve the problem himself. He would open a restaurant, which back then meant buying a large tent to set up on the side of road. Beef noodles from Lanzhou had become popular in Xining, so Han hired a noodle cook from the Qinghai capital, packed up his young family (now married with two children) and opened Lhasa's first la mian shop. It was 1983.
Yingke Halal Noodles didn't last long. By 1985, Han was back in Xining, searching for a new way to make money. He drove a Soviet Lada taxi. He mined for gold in today's Kekexili Nature Reserve.
Always fashionable, he got into the clothing trade, which took him to Fujian province. Again, he couldn't find halal food. Returning to Xining, he decided to try noodles again. He sold the furniture, the family's winter clothes, everything they had. He pocketed 7,000 RMB and the family left, this time for Xiamen, where no one from back home would know if he failed.
They arrived late and spend the first night at the train station, waiting for morning. When daylight came, Han didn't waste any time. That day, he scouted and rented a location for 3,000 RMB. He spent another 3,000 RMB on three tables, stools and kitchen equipment. Xibei Halal Noodles opened the next day. Han had picked up the noodle-making process from the cook in Tibet. His wife made the soup. Two relatives who came with them washed dishes and handled money.
Their first day of business brought in 70 RMB. Han did a quick calculation. They had been open for 12 hours but the revenue wouldn't be enough to cover their costs. The next day, and every day after that, business improved. Allah had given Han the ability to pull noodles, he told me, and now it was paying off. They began making 200, 300 RMB a day as customers in the southern city returned over and over for this novel type of northwestern noodle. This time it would work. He brought his father to Xiamen. He called cousins, and cousins of cousins, and friends of cousins, and before long, the beginnings of the modern Hualong noodle network were starting to form.
Han may not have been the first person to open a beef noodle shop outside of northwest China, a government official in Hualong County would later tell me (apparently others had gone to Shanghai), but he was the first one from Hualong to be successful on the East Coast. From Xiamen, overseas Chinese investors brought him, his family and his noodle shop to Indonesia and later the Philippines. By the time he returned to Qinghai in 2001, settling in Xining and opening yet another beef noodle shop just steps away from the city's revered Dongguan Mosque, he was a local hero. (Han's shop, Zhenya Beef Noodles (震亚牛肉面), is still open in Xining on Dongguan Avenue.)
Today, there is a mock shop modeled on that first Xiamen store in the city's Hand-Pulled Noodle Industry Service Center, part of a massive government building in Hualong, and Han Lu is first among the profiles of successful noodle businessman displayed on the walls. He is, according to the government, the first to "go out" of Hualong and his Xiamen noodle store created the blueprint for all others to follow.
The noodle industry is so crucial to Hualong that, apart from the extensive official exhibition and a dedicated service call center, the county's website gives the hand-pulled noodle industry its own prominent position on its homepage.
Once known as among the poorest areas of China, with few opportunities to leave, Hualong is now synonymous with hand-pulled noodles, and the county government has established "embassies" in more than 40 cities across China to help their noodle-makers deal with the practicalities of doing business and living far from home. In noodles, at least, Hualong is everywhere.
Unspoken in all of this is the fact that, as Han told me, there were no beef noodles in Hualong when he was growing up. They came from Lanzhou to Xining in the late 1970s, and spread from there (with his help). While Han was scrupulous about naming his restaurants in Lhasa (Yingke Halal Noodles; 迎客清真面馆) and Xiamen (Northwestern Halal La Mian Restaurant; 西北清真拉面餐厅), later generations found it a lot easier to borrow the established reputation of Lanzhou, and just call their shops (something something) Lanzhou La Mian, a practice that's both common and heavily looked down upon by people from Lanzhou (and Gansu in general) and the older generation of Hualong businessmen. While Lanzhou invented la mian, most people in the industry agree that Hualong entrepreneurs were responsible for first spreading and popularizing it across China.
We stopped for homemade yogurt at a roadside stall on our way back to Xining. Two women in black head coverings tended the stall, in what felt like a remote corner of China. Surely they would be surprised to see two big white guys (me and Graeme, the photographer) pop out of this van on a Saturday afternoon in Hualong. But no. As if to demonstrate the reach of the noodle industry, they both turned out to be noodle wives, having returned to their home county so their children could attend school, after years of living across China: Tianjin, Guangzhou, Nanjing, nine years in Shanghai.
Their husbands were away, still working and sending money home, and, perhaps charmed by Han's personality and status, one of them invited us into her home for tea, and, it turned out, an impromptu meal. That week had been Eid al-Adha (古尔邦节), and some believers still followed the tradition of slaughtering a sheep for the holiday. Sure enough, a plate of sacrificial lamb came to the table, with several other dishes and purple-skinned cloves of raw garlic.
For a county with a reputation as religious, conservative and not particularly friendly to outsiders, it was a generous display of hospitality, made possible by a simple dish that Han had pioneered, that these women's families had prospered from and that we all had in common: la mian.
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Photos: Graeme Kennedy
