Opinion | World's most expensive baklava: US$25,000 cake goes viral on Chinese social media

All it took was a slice of Xinjiang cake to spark heated debates online over China's policy on ethnic minorities.

Since Monday, qiegao (cut cake) has been a trending topic on Sina Weibo, China’s main Twitter-like microblogging service.

The cake was a reference to Xinjiang’s famed nut cake, sometimes known by its old Turkic name baklava, a popular pastry across Central Asia and the Middle East. In Xinjiang, they are sold by Uygur vendors on tricycles who are known to charge dubious prices depending on the time and season.

The ethnic flare-up started after the Yueyang police from Hunan province posted a message on their official Weibo account. It reported a dispute in Pingjiang county over an overpriced piece of nut cake between a Xinjiang Uygur vendor and a villager named "Ling".

Villager Ling got into a fight with a Uygur due to a misunderstanding. The verbal dispute eventually escalated into a fight and then a mass fight. As a result, two people were injured and Xinjiang nut cakes worth about 160,000 yuan [US$25,000] were destroyed. The total damage was worth 200,000 yuan which included a broken motorcycle and injuries to people. Local police have detained Ling. The 16 Uygur sellers were dully compensated and sent back to Xinjiang.

"Yueyang police incident" quickly became one of the most popular topics on Weibo. Yueyang police removed the post shortly after. As of Tuesday night, the topic was still amassing more than 66,000 hits. 

The incident is just one of many similar cases of ethnic tension across China, notably in Xinjiang province, where deeply entrenched social and racial friction between dominant ethnic Han Chinese and minority Uygur Muslims occasionally spark violence. Many Uygurs living in major Chinese cities are viewed by locals as thieves and crooks.