Cured Beef & Mutton (腊牛羊肉)

The thing Xi'an locals queue for at New Year is not a decoration or a trinket — it is a slab of cured meat. Là niú yángròu (腊牛羊肉, "cured beef and mutton") is the city's edible souvenir: beef and mutton salted, rolled and slow-braised in a spiced master stock, then pressed and sold by weight, sliced thin and eaten cold. It keeps, it travels, and a vacuum-packed half-catty from the right shop is the gift that announces you went to Xi'an.

The trade is old and Hui-run (halal), clustered in the lanes around the Muslim Quarter and the old meat-market streets. Three names recur: Liu Jixiao (刘纪孝), Jia Yongxin (贾永信) and Jiasheng (稼盛) — century-ish-old brands whose spring-festival queues are a local legend; the saying goes "train ticket in the left hand, Liu Jixiao cured beef in the right." Come the week before Chinese New Year, the lines wrap the block.

It is also the filling inside the Hui roujiamo — the 腊牛肉夹馍 (là niúròu jiāmó, cured-beef-in-a-bun) you'll have eaten in the Muslim Quarter is this exact meat, chopped warm into a baijimo. So the cured-beef shop and the street stall are two faces of the same animal.