Basmah Arshad is a doctoral candidate of history at the University of North Texas. Trained in cultural history, she is interested in issues of migration, race, and gender relevant to modern Asian and Asian American foodways. Previously, Arshad earned her Master’s in International and Regional Studies from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor in 2023. Throughout her academic career, Arshad has explored topics relevant to museums, diaspora, and borderlands histories.
In the spring of 2020, vlogger Arshad Mahmood walked along a strip of malls in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. He craved a specific dish: a Central Asian dumpling of heavily spiced meat called manta in Uyghur. For Mahmood and his fellow Pakistanis who learned of the dumplings via Chinese restaurant menus, it was called mantu. Mahmood eventually made his way to the restaurant Mizlick Meals and sat to eat his meal of mantu, laghman, and dapanji while the restaurant owner, a man named Hanzala, corrected Mahmood’s initial description of the restaurant as Chinese.[i] “[This is] total home-cooked food [from Xinjiang],” Hanzala said, recalling how his maternal grandmother had moved to Pakistan and kept her children and grandchildren connected to her homeland via food.[ii]
Since the 1940s, Uyghurs such as Hanzala’s grandmother have migrated to and settled in Pakistan. Initially using Pakistan as a stopping point in their eventual journey to Saudi Arabia for religious pilgrimage, political tensions within China eventually transformed Pakistan into a destination itself around the 1970s. Many, like Hanzala’s grandmother, settled in Rawalpindi, a city near the capital Islamabad. In Pakistan, Uyghurs maintain varying levels of connection to their heritage, with food critical to remembering the taste of their homeland. In Rawalpindi especially, an existing local fascination with Chinese textiles and, of course, food give the Uyghur diaspora an avenue to publicly connect with their homeland while ensuring their short- and long-term financial security. During the late 2010s and early 2020s, Pakistani vloggers increasingly record their experiences within Uyghur-owned Chinese restaurants, sometimes even meeting and speaking with the owners to learn about Xinjiang’s unique dishes, culinary techniques, and eating rituals. These vlogs offer insight into how the Uyghur diaspora in Pakistan maintains a subtle cultural and culinary border between themselves and Pakistan while relaxing the more rigid religious borders that Uyghurs hold within China. Given the Pakistani authorities’ willingness to suppress Uyghur nationalism within Pakistan at the behest of the Chinese government, these restaurants also offer insight into subtler forms of gastronomic nationalism.
In China, Uyghur cuisine is distinctly understood as a Muslim cuisine. Uyghurs are far from being the only Muslim-majority ethnic group in China; there are also Tatars, Kazakhs, and others. However, Uyghurs define their food in contrast to Han food, which encompasses Hui food. While the Hui explicitly mark their food as qīngzhēn (halal; pure by Islamic laws) to distinguish their dishes from the original non-qīngzhēn Han variants, the Uyghurs, in presenting themselves and their food as Muslim by default, do not. It is a given that Uyghur food is qīngzhēn.[iii]
It is, similarly, a given that all food in Pakistan will be halal. Established in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, the incorporation of Islam into the foundations of Pakistani law makes it legally and culturally difficult to sell or even acquire non-halal ingredients such as alcohol or pork. Within Pakistan, Uyghur cuisine is not distinct as a Muslim cuisine but is instead widely understood as “Chinese,” with most Pakistanis seeing no distinction between Han and Uyghur cuisine. It is all Chinese, and this broad label enables Uyghurs like Hanzala to open restaurants and thrive.
These vlogs center Pakistani reception and fascination toward Uyghur cuisine and culture, but they also provide insight into how Uyghurs have maintained and sold their foodways outside of Xinjiang. Without the distinction as a Muslim cuisine, Uyghurs are enveloped into the broad category of Chinese cuisine, a categorization they may reject within China itself, especially as China’s vast culinary and ethnic diversity enables culinary nationalism.[iv] That Uyghurs in Pakistan demonstrate a flexibility with Pakistani vloggers who insist on calling them Chinese as opposed to Uyghur, softly correcting them but not pressing the point, demonstrates how they have adapted to Pakistani norms. The adoption of Pakistani and Han cuisine into their restaurant menus further demonstrates Uyghur willingness to evolve Uyghur cuisine into a broader category. This can be read as a strategic marketing decision, but it also signals soft assimilation into Pakistani society by sacrificing public identity claims for the maintenance and commercialization of their foodways. This ensures their long-term security and stability within Pakistan, as overt Uyghur nationalism could risk negative attention from Pakistani authorities.
For example, apart from Mahmood’s 2020 vlog, a 2022 vlog from a Pakistani woman named Fatima features another Uyghur-owned restaurant in Rawalpindi: the aptly-named China Xinjiang Restaurant. Fatima makes her way to the rooftop, where she sits cross-legged and at an angle to watch the sunset while her food is served. Her dinner menu provides a glimpse into how Uyghurs combine their food traditions with that of Pakistan’s – rooh afza, a concentrated rose syrup mixed with water popular in Pakistan, is served alongside chay dora, a herbal tea blend popularly consumed by Uyghurs. The latter, in particular, is served with some theater, as the waiter initially pours some tea into a small bowl before immediately tossing it out onto the floor and re-filling the bowl. This method for serving tea is common within Uyghur and Han cuisine, but it is unique to Pakistanis like Fatima, who treat the tea pouring as a spectacle and the tea itself as a unique medicinal beverage.
Taken together, these vlogs reveal how Uyghur cuisine in Pakistan exists within a carefully negotiated space of visibility and containment. In China, Uyghur food functions as both a marker of Muslim identity and a boundary against Han culinary nationalism.[v] In Pakistan, however, where halal is the default, that religious distinction dissolves. What remains legible to Pakistani consumers is not “Muslim food,” but “Chinese food.” This broad categorization both obscures and enables: it envelops Uyghur identity within a generalized Chinese aesthetic while simultaneously providing restaurateurs the commercial legitimacy and political safety necessary to operate within Pakistan.[vi]
Uyghur cuisine in Pakistan is neither fully assimilated nor fully distinct. It occupies a liminal position: publicly Chinese, privately Uyghur; commercially adaptable, culturally rooted. In this diasporic setting, food becomes more than sustenance or spectacle. It is a medium through which identity is preserved, softened, and strategically reframed.
[i] Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 27-31; Cristina Cesaro, “Polo, Läghmän, So Säy: Situating Uyghur Food Between Central Asia and China” in Situating the Uyghurs Between China and Central Asia, eds. Ildiko Beller-Hann, Cristina Cesaro, and Joanne Smith Finley (London: Routledge, 2007), 187-188.
[ii] Arshad Mahmood, “Lets Eat Mantoo a Chinese Dish | Murree Road Rawalpindi,” YouTube video, 10:22, March 10, 2020, Lets Eat Mantoo a Chinese Dish | Murree Road Rawalpindi
[iii] Qīngzhēn (清真) literally translates to “simple” or “plain” but has come to stand for “Muslim” in modern Chinese. However, the word mùsīlín (穆斯林) is more commonly used to refer to adherents of Islam, while qīngzhēn refers to food that is considered “halal” (permissible for consumption according to Islamic laws and norms).
[iv] John Beck, “China is erasing their culture. In exile, Uyghurs remain defiant,” National Geographic, November 22, 2022,
[v] Gardner Bovingdon, The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 199; Dru Gladney, Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities And Other Subaltern Subjects (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 11-20.
[vi] Nicolas Becquelin, “Xinjiang in the Nineties,” The China Journal, no. 44 (2000): 65, 74-76; Michael Clarke, “China’s “War on Terror” in Xinjiang: Human Security and the Causes of Violent Uighur Separatism,” Terrorism and Political Violence 2, no. 20 (2008): 76-78; Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, “Han Migration to Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region: Between State Schemes and Migrants’ Strategies,” Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie 2, no. 138 (2013): 155-157; James Milward, “Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Xinjiang,” Inner Asia 2, no. 2 (2000): 122.
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