Khao Soi Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Northern Thai Khao Soi sinks supple egg noodles into a broth of curry and coconut milk, then crowns them with a tangle of the same noodles fried until crisp. It seems to have taken its present form in Chiang Mai and elsewhere in the north between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though no record from the time has been found that says when that form was settled.

The dish is said to have been brought by the Chin Haw, also called the Ho: Yunnanese Muslims who traveled as traders in caravans over the mountain roads linking Yunnan, Burma and Northern Thailand. The bond between the dish and these people lives on in what they call it. The Ho themselves know it as khao soi ho, or "Islamic khao soi," and because it is a Muslim dish, the meat is chicken or beef. Yet no record has been found of when, or by what road, these noodles came into Northern Thailand. What can be traced is the tie between the name and the dish, and no further.

The Chin Haw's settling into Chiang Mai left its mark on the city's mosques. In 1877, Yunnanese and Indo-Pakistani Muslim traders built the Chang Phuak Mosque. A trader from Yunnan who had moved to Chiang Mai in 1905 began in 1917 to raise funds among his fellow Yunnanese and gave his own land to build the Ban Haw Mosque.

Today Khao Soi is an everyday bowl for ordinary people in the north, eaten at noodle shops and street stalls. Its broth is heavy with spices, chili among them. Chili is a New World crop, but it had already reached Thailand by the sixteenth century; Khao Soi took on its shape long after that.

There is, in fact, a second dish that answers to the name Khao Soi. It comes from Luang Prabang in Laos: hand-cut rice noodles dressed with a sauce of tomato and minced pork. The name is shared, but the Northern Thai version is a curry-and-coconut egg-noodle bowl and the Lao one a tomato-and-pork rice-noodle bowl, and neither the main ingredients nor the method overlap. No source has been found that traces the two back to a common ancestor. To fold their origins into one just because they share a name would be a mistake.

For the Northern Thai dish itself, the usual account holds that the Chin Haw brought it along the trade road that ran from Yunnan through Burma into Northern Thailand. The name keeps that connection. The dictionary of Thailand's Royal Institute records that Khao Soi was originally called ก๋วยเตี๋ยวฮ่อ, "the noodles of the Ho," that is, of the Yunnanese. The history of the carriers themselves has been traced in a study by Wang Liulan: Ho caravans moved between Yunnan, Burma, Laos and Northern Thailand in the nineteenth century, and Yunnanese Muslims are thought to have first settled in Northern Thailand in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The study does not discuss the dish, though. What it tells us is that the carriers were there at that time, and no more.

A different view of this account has also been put forward. To call the dish flatly "Yunnanese," it argues, is to confuse the people who carried it with the place that produced it. On this view, present-day Yunnan has no noodle dish that pairs yellow egg noodles and a topping of fried noodles with a spiced coconut-milk broth, while that form matches Burmese ohn no khao swè. The view also notes that the Lanna kingdom of Northern Thailand was under Burmese rule from 1558 to 1775, and sees a Burmese layer in that. If so, the Chin Haw were less the makers of the dish than the people who carried it along a road through the Shan State of Burma. But this is the view of a single food blog, and no scholarly study has yet made this comparison; the dates of Burmese rule, too, are the ones the blog gives. For now, it remains a hypothesis.

One question is still unsettled: where the name Khao Soi comes from. The Thai word soi (ซอย) means to chop finely or cut into small pieces, and one explanation reads the name, together with khao ("rice"), as "cut rice." Another view holds that the Thai name was borrowed from Burmese ခေါက်ဆွဲ or Shan ၶဝ်ႈသွႆး. The tie between the dish and the Chin Haw can be followed back through its old name, but where the name Khao Soi itself came from is still undecided.