Tianshui Malatang

01

Malatang on a plate, under a blanket of chili

Tianshui malatang is boiled skewers tossed on a big plate with oil-poured chili and Sichuan pepper, eaten with potato noodles and flatbread.

Ordinary malatang is a bowl: you pick vegetables, tofu, meatballs and noodles from a fridge, and the shop boils them in a spicy or bone broth and serves them in it. Tianshui’s version starts the same way, with skewers of greens, tofu skin, kelp, lotus root, potato and quail eggs picked from the shelf, so many that diners carry them to the counter in their fist like a bunch of flowers. They are boiled briefly and then, in the classic Tianshui style, slid off the sticks onto a big porcelain or aluminum plate and tossed with crushed peanuts, diced pickled mustard stem, salt, a pinch of ground Sichuan pepper and several spoons of 油泼辣子, chili flakes scalded with hot oil, until everything is coated red.

The writer Wang Xuan lists three marks of the local style in a 2024 essay in People’s Daily: it is tossed dry, without soup; it comes on a big plate rather than in a bowl; and it is eaten with 白饼, plain white flatbread. A bowl of chewy potato noodles completes it. Many shops will also serve it in broth if you ask, and a skewer cost one or two yuan in 2024.

Sources [5][6]

02

Gangu chilies and Maiji Sichuan pepper

The dish is about the chili, and Tianshui cooks will only use their own.

Gangu, a county west of Tianshui, is called the home of chili, and Gansu’s official accounts date its chilies to a county gazetteer of 1627, when Gangu was called Fuqiang (the history of that date is below). Today it grows about 30,000 mu of them and has more than a hundred chili processors. Gangu chilies are deep red and rich in oil, and they are prized more for fragrance and color than for heat. The Gansu writer Ye Zi notes that local cooks will not make the city’s other famous snack, guagua, with anything but top-grade Gangu chili powder.

The making is seasonal. In September the chilies are picked and strung on cotton thread in strands a meter long to dry under the eaves; in winter the dried pods are cut, roasted in a dry pan and pounded to flakes in a stone mortar. Hot oil poured over the flakes, with sesame and other seasonings, makes the 油泼辣子 that covers every plate. The numbing half of the name comes from Sichuan pepper grown in the same hills: Tianshui has cultivated it for a thousand years, mostly the deep-red Dahongpao variety, and Wudu in neighboring Longnan leads China in pepper output. Visitors keep saying the same thing: the plate looks fiery, but the chili oil is more aromatic than hot.

Sources [2][5][8][9]

03

Hand-rolled potato noodles and white flatbread

The noodles are made from Gansu potatoes, and for many visitors they were the real discovery.

Gansu is one of China’s great potato provinces, and the noodles that come with Tianshui malatang are made from potato starch. In the hill villages potatoes are dug in August, crushed and pressed, and the juice is left in big vats, the water changed again and again until the starch settles clean, then dried. The starch is made into wide, translucent noodles: Dingxi, Gansu’s “potato capital,” has 120 noodle makers selling over three billion yuan a year under a registered geographical-indication name, and Tianshui shops make their own 手擀粉, hand-rolled potato noodles, which are thicker and much chewier than the machine-made kind. A portion cost 6 yuan in 2024 and, coated in chili oil, chews almost like rice cake.

The other starch is 白饼, a plain round flatbread, torn and dragged through the chili oil left on the plate. Shops also sell deep-fried potato balls, another Gansu potato snack, as one of the skewers.

Sources [5][8][10][13]

04

Dry or in soup: malatang across Gansu

Malatang changes across Gansu, and Tianshui’s is the oiliest.

Gansu’s malatang is not one recipe. In the southeast, around Tianshui, the chili oil is heaviest and diners choose between a soupy bowl and the dry-tossed plate. Further northwest along the Hexi Corridor, in Zhangye and Jiuquan, there is less soup and the skewers are coated in thick sweet-and-salty sauces of each shop’s own making. In Tianshui many shops now weigh the skewers and mix each plate in a big ladle with a dozen sauces before pouring the chili over, a method that reminded one visitor of Sichuan’s maocai.

Sources [6][10][13]

05

Before 2024: a Sichuan dish and a Gansu chili

Tianshui’s malatang is a local version of a Sichuan dish, and its famous chili has a shorter written history than the publicity says.

Malatang itself came from Sichuan. It is generally traced to Niuhua in Leshan, where Yangtze boatmen and trackers are said to have boiled cheap food in a spicy pot in the 1940s, and until the 1980s it was eaten mainly in southern cities such as Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan and Guiyang before it spread north. Tianshui’s own histories do not mention it: neither the 1985 Tianshui Shihua by Ma Tiancai nor the 2007 edition edited by Liu Mali has an entry for malatang. What the city had were the ingredients and the habit. Small shops were making their own version long before the videos: Wu Hongfang, who runs a malatang shop of seven or eight tables in Qin’an county, began working on her seasoning at sixteen and had kept the shop for twenty-four years when the boom came, taking nearly 10,000 yuan a day even before it.

The numbing half is ancient. The early pharmacopoeia Shennong Bencao Jing mentions 秦椒, qinjiao, and the sixth-century Qimin Yaoshu says that one kind of Sichuan pepper “comes from Wudu, qinjiao from Tianshui,” so Sichuan pepper has been a Tianshui product for at least fifteen centuries. The chili is far younger, because chilies only reached China from the Americas in the late Ming. Gansu’s publicity dates Gangu chilies to a gazetteer of 1627, but the historian Brian Dott, surveying local gazetteers for his history of the chili in China, finds Gansu’s first mention in 1737, in a gazetteer of Suzhou, today’s Jiuquan, and notes that the old Gansu name for chili was also qinjiao, which had first meant Sichuan pepper. The food historian Cao Yu finds chilies entering the gazetteers of Baoji, Tianshui and Lanzhou only in the second half of the nineteenth century, spreading west from Shaanxi and passing into Hui Muslim cooking on the way. Whichever date is right, by the twentieth century Gangu’s chilies were the region’s best, and in 2024 Gangu chili powder sold for 20 to 30 yuan a jin against about 10 for ordinary powder.

Sources [3][4][11][12]

06

Spring 2024: the bowl that filled a city

A seven-second video in February 2024 sent millions of people to a city most Chinese had never visited.

Just after the 2024 Spring Festival, a user posted a seven-second video of a red, glistening plate of Gansu malatang with the caption “Gansu malatang should be popularized nationwide.” It collected more than a million likes, and by mid-March videos of Tianshui’s malatang were at the top of China’s social media. Tianshui, Gansu’s second city, known until then for the Buddhist caves of Maijishan and the temple of the mythical emperor Fuxi, was overrun. Searches for it on travel platforms rose 186 percent in one week; by 28 March related videos had been viewed 16.77 billion times, and from 1 to 28 March the city received 3.89 million tourists and 2.25 billion yuan in tourism income.

The city responded in the way Zibo had for its barbecue the year before. On 16 March it held an official meeting on “service guarantees” for malatang; it ran free bus lines from the railway station to the malatang streets, staged a malatang festival, cut ticket prices at sights and put volunteers on the streets, and residents pressed gifts on visitors. Queues ran to two hours and more; at the most famous shop, Haiying, people lined up from half past two in the morning, eight hours before it opened, and nearly a million visitors came over the three-day Qingming holiday in April.

Sources [1][7][9][10][15]

07

Why the copycats closed

The dish traveled badly, and the lesson was that people had come for Tianshui.

Within weeks, “Tianshui malatang” shops opened all over China, some after a three-day course in Tianshui, some through franchises asking 100,000 to 200,000 yuan, others with seasoning packs sold online. By the May Day holiday the first of them, in cities such as Jinan, Rizhao, Guilin and Suqian, were already up for transfer; one owner who had spent 300,000 yuan closed after eighteen days. The copies charged city prices by weight, while in Tianshui a skewer cost between half a yuan and two, two people ate well for 30 to 40 yuan, and many small shops did not raise their prices at all.

They also lacked the ingredients: the Gangu chili, the local pepper and oil, and the hand-rolled potato noodles. Not everyone was converted even in Tianshui; one Beijing diner found the plate red and fragrant but neither as hot nor as good as hoped. One widely shared analysis concluded that what went viral was not a recipe but Tianshui itself: its prices and its hospitality.

Sources [10][13][15]

08

How to order in Tianshui, and what it costs

Pick your skewers, say dry or soup, and add noodles.

Sources [5][6][13][14]

09

Tianshui malatang at home

The skewers are easy; make the chili oil properly.

Sources [5][8]

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