Why did wheat consumption of East Asia take the form of noodles and steamed bread, while in west Asia and Europe it was consumed as baked bread?
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I don’t claim to be a food anthropologist so take this with large doses of salt.
Bread is fairly universal in human civilization. There appears to be evidence of human bread making tens of thousands of years ago. If you live nomadically in a place where you’d have to carry water to survive, preparing food using less water is critical. Also, things like baked flat bread etc lasts longer so it can be prepared several days ahead of time and eaten while moving. Wheat (most breads) was likely first cultivated in the region that is known as Turkey today – which is geographically close to Europe.
Noodles are a more recent human invention comparatively speaking – believed to be around 4000 years old. The earliest traces of noodles are found in China although forms of it probably exist in various cultures. Noodles can be made out of a variety of grains and grasses including rice. Rice is a common staple of east and south east asia – it cannot easily be made into baked dough breads though since it has no gluten. Rice flour is easily made into flat sheets, dumplings and noodles.
In general, most of China was not nearly as heavily forested as ancient Europe was. Wood, aka fuel, was a more scarce resource and the basis of Chinese cuisine tends to employ more energy efficient techniques, like chopping food up into small pieces to increase surface area and decrease cooking time.
Steaming is also a technique that is energy efficient, far more so than baking. So the ancient Chinese rarely had ovens, and steamed their bread.
Northern China does produce and consume wheat
Historically though southern China has been more of a rice and millet society.
As others have said, wheat consumption tends to manifest more as buns and pancakes than baked bread. Partially this is a preference for steam cooking and also partially that the traditional wheat varieties there were lower gluten.
Making noodles or steamed bread requires a mill, which is the most basic infrastructure necessary for people to use grains as a food source, plus a pot, which is the most basic household good necessary for people to eat hot meals.
Baked bread, on the other hand, requires an oven. In pre-industrial societies, an oven was an unimaginable expense that was far beyond the reach of a peasant. Even for those who could afford an oven, having an oven in your house was a terrible idea because of the fire danger that they posed.
The high cost and danger of ovens meant that any building housing an oven had to be built for that specific purpose *and* had to be built far enough away from everything else that a fire wouldn’t spread.
Due to those issues, the Greeks and Romans viewed ovens as a sign of civilization – during antiquity it took a large civic investment to create and maintain a communal bakery, which was something that only the Greeks/Romans had the political sophistication to do.
That Greek/Roman tradition of building communal ovens continued all the way to the early industrial era in Europe, which had a side effect of creating the types of well organized local governments that were necessary to support communal ovens.
Pre-Industrial East Asian countries tended to have sophisticated national governments. That being said, local governments in the region didn’t look anything like they did in Europe to the point that it is fair to say that local government in East Asia did not exist. Without the strong, well organized local governments that are necessary to support large, communal investments, ovens were virtually non-existent in East Asia. Without ovens it isn’t possible to make bread.
And because this is reddit: yes, there are plenty of youtube channels that show you how to make small clay ovens to make bread. Those ovens are great for cooking a single loaf of bread that you would never want to eat (even if you were a midieval peasant). Those ovens are also often single use and, even when they can be used more than once, aren’t practical for making bread in sufficient quality or quantity to survive off of.
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