Five years ago, during peak Covid, I stumbled upon a video on YouTube of men making hand-pulled noodles in a noodle school in Lanzhou, China. I had no idea how to pronounce the name of the city back then, but somehow the video stuck to me and four years later, I was off to China. My noodle journey had taken me into cutting noodles by knife to using an Italian pasta machine to even finally getting a large noodle machine from my travels in Cambodia. Hand-pulled noodles remained a mystery and perhaps the biggest adventure of it all. It’s often named as the Everest of noodles, something that most people tell you not to even try because of how hard and taxing it is to make them.
In the winter of 2024, I decided that it was high time I went to China. The tension between India and China had wavered off slightly, even though it still took me a month to get my tourist visa. I embarked on a train journey to Lanzhou from Xi’an. The noodle masters wouldn’t reply or pick up my call because of how much India had blocked all Chinese websites so I decided to knock on their door without giving them a hint.
I had an address for a noodle school that I had picked up from browsing on the internet for months and landed with my suitcase and backpack. “I have come from India,” I had written on google translate, “I want to learn how to make noodles”. They were slightly taken back. A lot of people had never met an Indian, let alone seen one. They told me to sit and drink water. We sat for three hours while they told me about the course. My fellow classmates all seemed like buff Chinese men who were busy rolling dough before me. “Come next year”, they told me. And so exactly a year later in October 2025, I embarked on my biggest quest yet. Learning how to make Lanzhou Niurou Lamian—Lanzhou Beef Noodles.
Lanzhou Niurou Lamian is a Chinese noodle dish known for its chewy hand-pulled noodles, a rich clear beef broth served with sliced beef, fresh cilantro, chili oil, and slices of white radish. The dish can be traced back to the Qing dynasty all the way till the 1900s where it got popularized by a man called Ma Bao Zi, who opened a noodle shop in Lanzhou where it seemed to have gotten popular to the point that the city is now filled with thousands of noodle shops and different types of vocational schools, teaching people how to make the dish.
It was odd, but when I took the 7 hour train from Chongqing to Lanzhou, the temperature had dropped to 6 degrees with rain drizzling through. This was unusual for October. I took the subway and reached the school, a mostly empty neighbourhood with a few tall residential buildings, some restaurants and a huge mall with a ferris wheel on its terrace. It was deserted with a few cars and people on its street.
I entered the noodle school for the second time, but this time it was with my suitcase and a bag. All the boys looked up and laughed. Till this day I am not sure if they were laughing at me or something that had happened in class just before. But it didn’t deter me from my mission. It took a lot of Google Translate to explain that I’d come to study. They were shocked that I’d actually shown up. I told them that I would try the course for seven days. There were many things apart from the laughing boys that made me hesitant. I didn’t know an ounce of Mandarin. Duolingo lessons weren’t exactly that useful. I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough. Most of the men around me were buff and lifting and pulling kilos of dough. This was not going to be an easy task. I was also the only girl in the entire school and I was also quite possibly the only brown-skinned foreigner in the entire city. Nobody had seen an Indian, or even a brown-skinned person before. I remember while walking down the subway to noodle school so many small children would point at me because they had never seen someone like me before.
I decided it didn’t matter and attended class the next day. Classes started from 8.30 am and went all the way till 5 pm, with a lunch break in the middle where the students themselves used to take turns feeding everyone a bowl of their own hand pulled noodles and beef broth. The first day of school was intimidating. It was like joining school mid-semester, where everyone already had established friendships and knew how to go about the day. I stood there for the first five minutes, following the boys around, rethinking my dreams. They were a little hesitant but slowly they downloaded the translation apps on their phones just to talk to me. Slowly, giving me flour, telling me where to get water and salt to make the dough. Within a few minutes, I realised that language isn’t important to me because if anything I know how to observe and that was enough for me to learn how to cook.
Although, of course, not knowing Mandarin meant that it took me twice as much time as everyone else. I used to eat lunch and skip the break and learn to practice everything that had been taught to me in the hours before. The mornings were spent mostly making dough from scratch, maybe around 900 kneads to get the texture right. Sometimes it would take me an hour and a half to get it just right, the goal was to be able to knead and stretch the dough within 17 minutes. I wasn’t as strong as everyone so they used to let me practice with 500 grams, later moving me up to 1 kg while the rest of the class was using 5-7 kgs.
And then there was the broth. The broth was made using more than 15 spices (star anise, fennel, cardamom, nutmeg, dried ginger) and cow bones, boiled for at least 15 hours to be used for the next day. It was the same routine every single day. Picking up gallons of heavy pots and stirring for hours. There were no days off.
Mr. Young was my first friend in noodle school, a 55-year-old man who loved to cook but worked in the construction business back in his home town of Suzhou. “It’s the most beautiful place in China”, he often told me, as we exchanged conversations on Google translate. Mr. Young had a son my age and used to share my table, often smoking cigarettes as we practiced pulling noodles together, much like the rest of the class and teachers. There were breaks every 30 minutes just for a smoke. He was the most talkative man in class, most of the time I didn’t know what he was saying but he was always talking loudly, going around different tables, teaching or sometimes learning from them, causing laughter everywhere he went. He taught me more than my teachers, sometimes giving up on his own dough when he saw me struggling with mine. He was a genuinely curious person, he had never met an Indian so sometimes he would ask me where my bindi is, or if I could do the Indian dance. My favourite moment was when one day he told me in all sincerity, “since you love China so much, you should become our future daughter-in-law.”
The students there were anywhere from 20-60 years old, a lot of them had dreams of going back to their own cities within China and opening up their own noodle shop. I remember one of them asking me, if I was going back to India to open a shop of my own. I said no, all I wanted to do was to learn this for fun. It was a dream of mine, and all I wanted to do was feed my friends. He looked at me for a long time. He must have been thinking that who was crazy enough to come all the way to learn the hardest form of noodle making ‘just for fun’?
Never in my life had I thought that a group of fifteen Chinese men would help a brown girl learn how to make noodles. I finished the course learning far more than I ever expected, entirely through the kindness of strangers who I may never meet again. Looking back, it feels almost naïve to think this journey was ever just about noodles. What I was really learning was how to live: to chase small, curious dreams, and to find love, faith, and belonging in food and in people.
