Lanzhou Beef Noodles

01

Clear broth, white radish, red oil, green garlic, yellow noodles

Lanzhou describes a correct bowl in five colors: one clear, two white, three red, four green, five yellow.

Clear is the broth, beef stock simmered with spices and thinned until it is transparent. White is the slices of white radish cooked in it. Red is the chili oil, made by pouring hot oil over chili flakes. Green is the chopped garlic shoots and coriander. Yellow is the noodles themselves, which turn a pale yellow from the alkaline ash in the dough. On top sits a spoon of diced beef. The noodles are pulled for each bowl in the shape the customer orders, from hair-thin to belt-wide, and the bowl is assembled in seconds at a counter.

It is breakfast. Lanzhou people eat a bowl on the way to work, summer and winter, and many traditional shops open at dawn and close in the afternoon. The color formula was in popular use by the early 1980s and was adopted by city officials around 1983 as the official description; “five yellow” was added later. Ma Jiesan, son of the dish’s founder, put the standard more simply: the broth must be clear, the beef tender and the radish full of flavor.

Sources [1][2][4]

02

Lanzhou beef noodles and “Lanzhou lamian”

Most “Lanzhou lamian” shops in China are not from Lanzhou, and Lanzhou people do not call their own dish lamian.

In September 1990 a 34-year-old farmer from Hualong County in Qinghai, Han Lu, took 7,000 yuan to Xiamen and opened a northwestern noodle shop selling hand-pulled noodles. Over the next twenty years families from Hualong and neighboring Qinghai counties followed, opening shops across southern and eastern China under the name “Lanzhou beef lamian,” because Lanzhou was the name customers knew. In Lanzhou the dish is simply 牛肉面, beef noodles; locals reserve “lamian” for the shops opened by Qinghai people elsewhere.

The two are related but not the same. The Qinghai shops usually serve a broader menu of fried noodles, rice dishes and lamb skewers, and the Lanzhou noodle historian Sai Bingwen notes that many early ones leaned heavily on MSG and seasoning packets. A bowl in Lanzhou is about the broth and the pull.

Sources [1][2][9]

03

From a carrying pole to a national heritage item

The founder’s name is not in doubt; the year is.

The story starts with Ma Baozi, a Hui Muslim from Nantan Street in Lanzhou’s southern Muslim quarter, who sold noodles from two baskets on a carrying pole: cold noodles in summer, and in winter 热锅子面, “hot-pot noodles,” kept hot in broth over a little stove hung from the pole. Official accounts date his beef noodles to 1915, and add that he gave every customer a free bowl of broth on entering. Sai Bingwen, who wrote a book-length history of the dish, reconstructs from oral accounts that Ma, aged 49 and tired of the pole, rented a shop in the Dongchenghao market outside the east gate in 1919 and began selling beef noodles there, a first for a Lanzhou Muslim street vendor. At first, Sai writes, ordinary laborers found a bowl of clear soup and a few noodles too dainty, while clerks and merchants loved it.

His son Ma Jiesan, who took over around 1925, defined the bowl: the clear broth, the radish, the chili oil and coriander, and the names of the noodle shapes. A rhyme listed Ma Baozi’s noodles among the four wonders of the city, and in 1946 the Nationalist elder Yu Youren, passing through Lanzhou on his way to and from Xinjiang, ate them and is said to have left a piece of calligraphy. After 1956, when private businesses became joint state-private enterprises, Ma Jiesan was moved to a state canteen on Central Square, where queues stretched from dawn to noon. Noodle makers trained in that kitchen became the officially recognized third and fourth generations of a craft that was added to China’s national list of intangible cultural heritage in May 2021 and is now in its sixth.

Sources [1][3][4]

04

The broth: yellow cattle, spices and radish

The broth decides a shop’s reputation, and it is clear rather than rich.

Beef and bones are simmered for five to seven hours with a bag of more than a dozen spices, among them black cardamom, ginger peel, Sichuan pepper, nutmeg, cloves, white pepper and angelica root, then the stock is skimmed and thinned with water until it is transparent. Slices of white radish simmer in it. A popular legend says the secret is yak meat from the Tibetan plateau; Sai Bingwen points out that yak was rare in Lanzhou a century ago and that an old noodle maker found yak stock turns reddish-black, while yellow cattle give the clear, beer-colored broth the dish is named for. The heritage description lists both.

At the counter the bowl is built in a fixed order. At one old shop the server puts in half a ladle of broth, then diced beef and garlic shoots, then as much chili as the customer wants, and finally fills the bowl with boiling broth, which scalds the chili and garlic and releases their smell.

Sources [1][4][6]

05

The noodles: penghui and the pull

What makes the dough stretch without breaking is ash.

The dough is wheat flour and salted water, kneaded and beaten for a long time, with alkaline water worked in three times. In Lanzhou that alkali traditionally came from 蓬灰, penghui, an alkaline ash extracted from the penghao plant, which was cheaper than soda; it makes the dough elastic and turns the noodles faintly yellow. Ma Baozi’s refinement, Sai writes, was a second dose before service: a hollow punched in the rested dough, penghui water poured in with a little dry flour, then pounded, stretched and folded again and again. The dough is rolled into short logs, oiled and rested; for each order the cook takes a log, swings and stretches it, folds it, and doubles the strands with each pull. At a national competition one Lanzhou cook pulled maoxi eight times, into 256 strands with a total length of 384 meters.

Sources [1][4][8]

06

How to order in Lanzhou

You pay first, say a noodle shape, and collect your bowl at the counter.

Extra beef and an egg

Our own photograph of a bowl ordered with the extras.

Sources [2][6][7]

07

The politics of a bowl’s price

In Lanzhou the price of beef noodles was, for decades, a matter for the city government.

Lanzhou treated beef noodles as a staple whose price affected everyone. The city set the price itself until 1997, when its last official price was 1.70 yuan a bowl. In 2000 a provincial standard fixed the shapes and said a large bowl must hold at least 275 grams of cooked noodles and a small one 175. When shops raised the price from 2.20 to 2.50 yuan in 2006, and again in June 2007, the city’s price bureau issued an emergency cap, grading shops into four classes with a maximum of 2.50 yuan for a large bowl at an ordinary shop, which set off a national debate about price controls. Today a bowl costs about 8 yuan in Lanzhou: in 2025 a street shop charged 8 for noodles, 9 for a plate of extra beef and 2 for an egg, 19 yuan in all.

Sources [1][6][7]

08

Where to eat beef noodles in Lanzhou

Every Lanzhou family has its own shop, but a handful of names carry the city’s noodle history.

Ma Zilu (马子禄) is the name most visitors look for, and its founder’s life tracks the noodle’s politics. Sai Bingwen’s history says Ma Zilu’s father died in the 1930s, when Ma was 13 and began learning halal cooking and noodle making; Ma had a restaurant before turning thirty, saw it absorbed in the 1950s, and spent years pulling handcarts for a street transport team. After 1978 Ma returned to run a state canteen, then quit to rent a small kiosk and sell beef noodles independently, one of Gansu’s 13,000 licensed private businesses in 1980. The shop on Dazhong Lane, a food street between Nanbinhe Road and the Zhangye Road pedestrian street, gives its founding date as 1954. It still serves noodles in thick coarse bowls printed with its mark, long after most shops moved to finer ones, and in 2022 a bowl with diced beef cost 8 yuan, with free refills of broth. An older local saying gives the beef to another shop, Wumule (吾穆勒), and the broth to Ma Zilu.

Other names trace other chapters. In August 1979 a teenager’s first job was pulling noodles at the Mogouyan (磨沟沿) canteen, a tent run by the Hualinping street office, one of eight such street canteens in the district; after a flood it moved to the riverside and back again. In 1991 Zhou Fuyuan and Ma Wenbin of the Lanqingge canteen carried Gaolan’s heshangtou flour to a national snack contest in Zhengzhou and won the Ministry of Commerce’s Golden Tripod award; in 1993 the city merged Lanqingge, Hongbinlou and other old canteens into the Lanzhou Jinding (金鼎) Beef Noodle Company. In 2009 the government chose Dongfanggong (东方宫), a large halal restaurant group, to carry the “Lanzhou beef lamian” brand into other cities.

Whichever shop you choose, go early. Most traditional shops open at dawn and close by mid-afternoon. Buy a ticket at the counter, collect the bowl at the noodle window, and add vinegar and extra chili yourself.

Sources [1][6][10]

09

A Lanzhou industry worth 80 billion yuan

Lanzhou has spent the last two decades trying to reclaim its noodle from the imitators.

Gansu reports that the beef noodle industry chain earned 80 billion yuan in 2025, with more than 600 Lanzhou beef noodle outlets in over 60 countries and regions and most of the core ingredients now processed by machine. In July 2025 China added “beef lamian maker” to its official list of occupations, and a Lanzhou training school founded in 2012 has taught nearly ten thousand people, some of whom have opened shops in the United States, France and Britain. Away from home the bowl bends to local taste: the first Lanzhou-run shop in Guangzhou swapped garlic shoots for yellow chives because Cantonese customers would not eat them.

A bowl at Majiyong, October 2026

Our own photographs of one bowl of beef noodles at Majiyong (马记永), a beef noodle chain, in October 2026. The whole bowl is the photo at the top of this page.

Sources [1][3][5]

10

What else Lanzhou eats

A beef noodle breakfast is only the start of a day in Lanzhou.

Sources [2][7]

11

More northwestern noodles