Donkey-Meat Yellow Noodles

Donkey-meat yellow noodles are Dunhuang's most celebrated dish, in truth two dishes in one: a plate of hand-pulled golden-yellow noodles dressed in a sauce stir-fried from shiitake and diced donkey, served alongside a plate of sliced braised donkey meat.

Records of Dunhuang's fondness for wheaten food reach back some sixteen hundred years to the Sui and Tang, and both manuscripts from the Library Cave and a vivid scene of yellow-noodle making in mural cave 156 (Song dynasty) at Mogao attest to its age. Wheat, brought along the Silk Road, was widely grown around Dunhuang by the Tang, giving the noodles their material base and slowly shaping this famed dish.

The yellow noodles are eaten hot, tossed through with their sauce, while the braised donkey is sliced and dipped in garlic paste or pepper salt, the two complementing one another; the folk saying "dragon's meat in heaven, donkey's meat on earth" is praise for just this plate.

Its golden strands fine as a dragon's whisker and long as a golden thread, the savoury shiitake-and-donkey sauce, and the accompanying braised donkey are what set this dish apart from noodle foods elsewhere.