Zanda County is located in the Ali Prefecture of Tibet, on the border.

It has rich natural resources and great historical and cultural connotations.

It is also the county with the smallest population in China.

People here live a peaceful and leisurely life, and their living standards have been greatly improved.

This is a good tourist destination.

Zanda is the county with the smallest population in China, with less than 10,000 people.

It is the closest place in China to the capital of India in a straight line.

If you could climb the Himalayas and trek south, you could rush into New Delhi in a few hours.

In addition, there is a ruins of the Guge Dynasty, which is the most mysterious historical relic in Tibet.

Zaguge Ruins When I came back from the Guge Ruins that year, it was already lunch time and I was going to find a place to have a meal in the county town.

After walking around twice, I found that even in the smallest county in China, there are still Sichuan restaurants everywhere. My travel principle is to never eat food from outside.

So I found a Tibetan restaurant with a small facade and always hanging curtains.

The restaurant is filled with long and low painted tables, and pictures of thangkas or living Buddhas hang on the walls.

A row of thermos bottles filled with butter tea and sweet tea.

With more than one million square kilometers of Tibet, from south to north and from east to west, all Tibetan restaurants look the same.

Monotony is also the menu of Tibetan restaurants, you don’t even need to look at it.

Anyway, the variety will not exceed the number of your fingers.

The store is opened by a young couple.

The woman looks like a standard Tibetan woman.

This young man has dark skin and exaggeratedly large sideburns.

I ordered a Tibetan bun and a cup of sweet tea.

The lady boss went in to make steamed buns, and I chatted with the little boss.

He is from Pulan and opened a shop in Zada ??just a few years ago.

Pulan is also one of the least populous counties in the country, a little larger than the neighboring Zanda County.

Located at the junction of China, India and Nepal, there is the Pulan Port, the most important external channel in the Ngari region.

The young boss said that when he was four or five years old, he could see Indian businessmen bringing goods to do business every summer.

In recent years, he has been very strict and cannot see them.

Looking at the nose of the little boss, I recalled the time when I stopped on the roadside and heard the cheerful and deafening Indian songs coming from the shop. Then I thought about the clothes of the Indian male movie star, and I understood the origin of this young man's hairstyle.

It is difficult for outsiders to imagine how much influence Indian culture and art has had on Tibet.

The steamed buns were served.

They look delicate and are still steamed.

Most of the Tibetan buns I had eaten in Tibet and Nepal were fried, and steaming them at high altitudes is not easy.

It's stuffed with lamb.

The dough is very thick and there is not much filling.

There was once a special article about Tibetan steamed buns (see "Exploring China's 57th Tibetan Steamed Buns in Shigatse and Nepal's Mo:Mo").

The boss lady brought a free bowl of broth, which was muddy and had no real content.

I don't see a hint of green in these things.

That’s what Tibetan food is.

A few steamed buns don't look hungry, but a large cup of sweet tea is not low in calories.

At the end of this article, some readers may ask: Where is this little bun?

Is there anything worth writing about?

The question is, why do xiaolongbao from Jiangnan appear in a restaurant serving locals in perhaps the most remote place on earth (very few Chinese restaurants enter Tibet)?

It is not wrong at all to say that it originated in Jiangnan.

Traditionally, this type of pasta is not available in India and Nepal.

Nepalese buns were introduced from Tibet.

Were there steamed buns in Tibet before?

Not really.

Although most Tibetans now mainly eat pasta, wheat, a staple food, has not been introduced for many years.

My impression is that agricultural researchers developed high-quality plateau cold-resistant wheat around the 1960s and 1970s.

Before that, the staple food of Tibetans was bazan made from highland barley.

Therefore, all the foods currently provided by Tibetan restaurants, such as Tibetan steamed buns, dumplings, noodles, and flatbreads, are actually Han recipes.

You can try to deduce how steamed buns spread across the roof of the world.

The biggest possibility is that Sichuan chefs have taken Sichuan cuisine along the northern foothills of the Himalayas and across the Hengduan Mountains, invincible, just like elsewhere in China.

So the Tibetans also learned the pasta processing technology and brought it to Nepal, where it became Nepal’s specialty food “Mo:Mo”.

By this time it had been renamed "Tibetan steamed buns", which seemed to be a special Tibetan food.

Due to limitations of plateau fuel, the boiling point of water, etc., Tibetan buns are always small because it is difficult to ripen them if they are large.

If the xiaolongbao in Jiangnan is very exquisite in terms of food, it is so small and helpless in Tibetan areas.

Nepal: What is traditional food?

Not far away, I came to the most remote place in the world.

I insisted not to enter the Sichuan restaurant and only sat with Tibetans.

In fact, I still ate those things at home, and the taste was far different.

If you’ve read my previous travel blogs, you’ll understand why visiting local restaurants is a must.

It doesn't really matter whether it tastes good or not.

I'm not a foodie.

Post a photo of yourself at Zada, it’s rare to show your face.

After all, not many people have seen the Guge ruins.

Postscript: Due to physical reasons, I did not visit Pulan Port at the junction of the three countries. I deeply regretted it later.