A Chinese-Muslim Eatery in Shanghai
1. Soup with cabbage, carrots, fungus strips of rice flour and quail's egg 2. Flat bread with mutton, capsicum, carrot and onion gravy as topping 3. Stretching dough for the handmade noodles 4. Grilling mutton kebabs over a charcoal fire There are about 27 million Muslims in China-more than the population of Malaysia, Taiwan or Australia. The Uighur, Tartar, Uzbek, Tajik and Hui live mostly in the provinces that border Central Asia and Tibet, in the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningsia and Qinghai. Except for the Hui they are distinguishable from the real Chinese, the Han; having a more Mongolian look with deeply slanted eyes and a more stocky body. Their food is different too, and mutton forms a large part of their diet- a testimony to their nomadic past on the steppes. In Shanghai, I found a small Muslim eatery next to my hotel, and it was a 24-hour joint, the Uighur family that owned it working in two shifts. The clear soup above was flavored with bits of mutton, and was a r...