More than daily bread

Some morsels are palm-sized. Others are bigger than manhole covers. The variety from southern Xinjiang's Kuqa, for instance, is often compared to the size of wagon wheels and is displayed next to actual wagon wheels for scale.

A standard Xinjiang breakfast is a cup of milk tea and a slice of naan.

The Naan House has devised a novel synthesis of this concept, folding what are traditionally plate-shaped provisions into crispy cups. These bready mugs brim with salty Uygur milk tea or bitter Turkish coffee brewed in an ibrik submerged in hot sand. Others cradle jiggling heaps of local yogurt or frosty orbs of ice cream bejeweled with regional fruits and nuts.

They're new pages in this bread's biography, an epic chronicle that has been inscribed in everyday life for over two millennia.

This typically circular bread represents a wheel of time cut into wedges like slices of history. The oldest surviving relic — a piece from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) — is exhibited in the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi.

Naan was an ideal fuel to power Silk Road travel. Merchants piled it onto the backs of camels, stacking carbs like coins to bank calories they'd spend trekking barren tracts between oases.