Reflections | History of Chinese flatbreads reflects how food has echoes of faraway places

I paused for a moment, tin in hand, trying to place that recognition. Maybe it was a coincidence – two bakers, two places, arriving at the same recipe. Or perhaps one borrowed, knowingly or not, from the other. Food has a way of carrying echoes, and sometimes what we taste is less an invention than a continuation.

China has been doing this – absorbing, adapting, making its own – for a very long time. As early as the second century BC, it had already taken in an import that had travelled thousands of miles along the Silk Road: hubing. The name itself says as much. Bing is a broad category of flour-based foods, but the prefix hu marks it as something foreign, something that came from elsewhere.

The story begins with Zhang Qian (c. 195BC-114BC), a Han-period envoy who journeyed west and returned with more than diplomatic contacts.