Biangbiang noodles


Biangbiang noodles, alternatively known as youpo chemian in Chinese, are a type of noodles popular in the cuisine of China's Shaanxi Province. The noodles, touted as one of the "eight strange wonders of Shaanxi", are described as being like a belt, owing to their thickness and length.
The noodle is broad and hand-made. It was originally part of a poor man's meal in the countryside, but has recently become renowned due to the unique character used in its name.
Dishes with this noodle are often topped with many red hot peppers for the cold winter in Shaanxi.

Chinese character for ''biáng''

There are many variations of the character for biáng, but the most widely accepted version is made up of 58 strokes in its traditional form, and the Chinese character for biáng is one of the most complex Chinese characters in modern usage, although the character is not found in modern dictionaries or even in the Kangxi dictionary.
The character is composed of 言 in the middle flanked by 幺 on both sides. Below it, 馬 is similarly flanked by 長. This central block itself is surrounded by 月 to the left, 心 below, and刂 to the right. These in turn are surrounded by a second layer of characters, namely 穴 on the top and 辶 curving around the left and bottom.

Phonetic substitution

Both the traditional and simplified Chinese characters for biáng were encoded in Unicode, on March 20, 2020, for Unicode 13.0.0. The code point is U+30EDE for the traditional form and U+30EDD for the simplified form.
Until that point, there were no standardized ways of entering or representing them on computers. Both traditional and simplified forms had been submitted to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group for inclusion in CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G. As the characters are not widely available on computers, images of the characters, phonetic substitutes like or , as well as the pinyin, are often used instead.
The character is described by the following ideographic description sequences :
⿺

⿺
In Adobe's Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif font these IDS sequences do not display as IDS sequences, but display the actual glyphs for the character.

Unicode

Before 2020, up to the version 12.1, this character was not included in Unicode. Thus, Ming Fan submitted an application to Unicode Consortium. After that, in the meeting WS 2015, the traditional character has a code “UTC-00791” while the code of its simplified character is “UTC-01312”.
However, the evidence for this character does not fully match the character shape. For UTC-00791, “radical 刂 ” has disappeared from the dictionary which is used as evidence. For UTC-01312, “radical 刂 ” has swapped into “radical 戈 ” in the academic paper which is used as evidence. Members of the Unicode Consortium argued for the character shape. Moreover, Toshiya Suzuki suggested for adding a new block “CJK Complex Ideographic Symbols”, set “” as a basic shape, unify the variation and even admit “” as a variant form of this character.
At last, the traditional and simplified forms of the character were added to Unicode version 13.0 in March 2020. The characters are located in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G block in the newly-allocated Tertiary Ideographic Plane. The corresponding Unicode characters are:
There are a number of mnemonics used by Shaanxi residents to aid recall of how the character is written.
One version runs as follows:
Note that the first two lines probably refer to the character 宀, building it up systematically as a point and a line with two bends.

Origin of the character

The origins of the biangbiang noodles and the character biáng are unclear. In one version of the story, the character biáng was invented by the Qin Dynasty Premier Li Si. However, since the character is not found in the Kangxi Dictionary, it may have been created much later than the time of Li Si. Similar characters were found used by Tiandihui.
In the 2007 season of the TVB show The Web, the show's producers tried to find the origin of the character by contacting university professors, but they could not verify the Li Si story or the origin of the character. It was concluded that the character was invented by a noodle shop.
One hypothesis is that there was no such character or meaning for this word in the beginning, and the word actually came from the sound people make from chewing the noodles, "biang biang biang".
A legend about a student fabricating a character for the noodle to get out of a biangbiang noodle bill also is a commonly-believed hypothesis about the origin of the character.
According to an article on China Daily, the word "biang" actually refers to the sound made by the chef when he creates the noodles by pulling the dough and slapping it on the table.

Variants

Seventeen variants of the Traditional character for biáng, having between 56 and 70 strokes: