Elsewhere in Central Asia, laghman is often submerged in broth, but here the noodles are cooked on their own and then given a ladling of beef stew. “Soup is soup; laghman is laghman,” said Adil Nurdun, who grew up in Toksun County, south of Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, and runs the restaurant with Arkin Ali, a native of Aksu Prefecture to the west, bordering Kyrgyzstan.

Then let us individually aim at paradising the world, and these efforts, though feeble, would doubtless be blessed to ourselves […]

[…] all our grannies tell us how He kill’d a whacking great dun cow;

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation