Word: dhofar
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...chopsticks restaurant in salalah, the capital of the Omani province of Dhofar, is no longer open, its "passable" food and "awful" service (as one unsympathetic guidebook had it) now just a sweet-and-sour memory. Yet only a few doors away, the splashiest new eatery in the forgotten, once glorious town is Chinese Cascade, which serves Mandarin prawn toast, cauliflower Manchurian and vegetable wontons. It's "The Authentic Chinese Restaurant," if you believe the sign, but when an unsuspecting visitor steps in, he finds that the waiters, the diners, the owners - everyone is Indian. "Here there are so many Pakistani...
...once the center of the world now seems to lie on the remotest margins. It's hard to believe that this torpid, sand-colored town, with its bored Indian shopkeepers sitting outside foodstuff-and-luxuries stalls and camels grazing outside the (largely empty) Hilton Hotel, was once the Dhofar that Zheng He's ships (though not, it seems, the admiral himself) sought out, in 1432 on their seventh voyage. The Salalah Holiday Inn slumbers near the spot where old Chinese coins were once discovered. The classified section of the Oman Daily Observer reports that someone named Zou Shichui has lost...