Xunhua

Xunhua, on the south bank of the Yellow River in eastern Qinghai about 165 km from Xining, is the only Salar autonomous county in China - the Salar, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people whose ancestors are said to have arrived from Central Asia following a camel, make up around sixty percent of its 134,000 residents, and Tibetans, Hui, Han, Tu and Bao'an share the same valley. Its economy is agricultural at home and remarkably mobile abroad: walnut, pepper and fruit orchards fill the warm river terraces, the Xunhua 'thread chilli' has held a national geographical-indication trademark since 2015, and Xunhua families run more than 7,500 Lanzhou-style noodle restaurants across a hundred Chinese cities, employing tens of thousands of people in what locals simply call 'the noodle economy'. There is no university in the county and students go to Xining for Qinghai University and Qinghai Nationalities University, but Xunhua is a serious cultural destination in its own right. Visitors come for Mengda Tianchi, a national nature reserve so lush it is nicknamed 'the Xishuangbanna of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau', for the Camel Spring at Jiezi where the Salar migration legend ends, and for the Tibetan side of the county at Wendu, birthplace of the 10th Panchen Lama.