Who is LiZiqi, and her dramatic success from an internet celebrity to a business women worth millions of dollars
If you are here, you probably know LiZiqi from her YouTube channel, who has a massive 14.6 million subscribers at the time of wringing and a total cumulative views of more than 2 billion. The average views of her videos range from 10M to 10M, some of those exceeding 50M. And this is only a fraction of the views of her videos on the Chinese platform.
After achieving such a remarkable success as an internet celebrity specializing in video production production, she then created her own brand “Ziqi culture”, worth millions of dollars.
For those who don’t know her, I would highly recommend you to take a quick look at her channel, it will help you relax, enjoy the tranquility of the day and definitely fall in love with the country side views.
For example, in this video “How to make Salted Duck Egg Yolk Sauce”, she started from the absolute beginning, of when the duck was born (and raised by a chicken for some reason, which is simply hilarious haha).
Here is another of my favorite video where she made a few Chinese traditional desserts with roses.
Introduction to LiZiqi
LiZiqi’s videos mostly depict the lifestyle of living a tranquil life in the rural areas of China.
She has her own beautiful garden and planted all sorts of vegetables and flowers.
She cooks and eats what she sows and nurtures.
She goes to the mountains and gracefully collects what our nature gifts us.
Her farmhouse is guided and decorated by the traditional 24 solar terms, probably learnt from her grandmother, which is a Chinese lunar calendar guiding the farming activities through out the year.
What makes her special
What is special about her video is how she turned the ordinary life of a farmhouse, into a beautifully written fairy tale, seemingly from a different world, previously unseen but unrealistically beautiful. There are no words spoken, no descriptions of any sorts, just pure beauty of the nature, and how she turns the purest forms of the production of our planet earth, and turned them into artistic Chinese desserts.
Many of her fans call her videos “healing the souls”, immersing the audience and giving them a momentary escape of the daily hassles, which I would totally agree.
Sometimes, when having dinner alone, I would simply turn on her video, and enjoy the much cherished peaceful time free from hustle and bustle.
The story of LiZiqi
LiZiqi was born on 6 July 1990, in a small rural village named Mianyang, Sichuan Province in China. Her parents divorced when she was little. Her father died young and she had been often abused by her step-mother.
LiZiqi recalled in her interview that when she was as long as six, her step-mother would pull her hair and push her around. Her grand-parents then brought her to their side and raise her. LiZiqi recalled that if without her grand-parents, she would have probably died.
LiZiqi had a very unfortunately childhood when compared to others, which is what probably turned her into a more independent person, according to LiZiqi.
In her videos, we often see and are amazed by how skillful LiZiqi is, when making all sorts of food, tools and even furniture. In her early days, there were controversy and doubts from naysayers who refuse to believe any single human being could be so good and familiar with so many skillset.
What struck me a lot is how she said “these skills may seem to be unbelievable to many people but to me, there were merely means to survive and feed myself. I do all of them with ease simply because they are the survival techniques of mine when I was growing up.”
I guess when we don’t have what we take for granted, we would be amazed at what we can achieve too.
LiZiqi’s grand-father was a chef and she has been along his side when she was shorter than the kitchen table, giving a hand to her grand-father to start fire and wash dishes. She says that “those food has therefore, become the most delicious taste in her memory”.
LiZiqi said that all the food and desserts showed case in the video are also what she cooks and eats day to day, except when in the videos, she would dress up a bit.
LiZiqi’s grand-father also dired when she was little and she has since been living with her grand-mother, who often appears in her video too. There are occasionally a few dialogue words spoken between them in the video, and even without understanding the words, there is no meaning lost.
When LiZiqi was 14 years old, she had to dropped out of school and left for the big cities to make a living. She started a 8 year journal in the big cities which was extreme hardship at the beginning. She slept on the benches in the park and had to survive on nothing but breads for months.
She has worked in restaurants, as a DJ in a club, and even started a few side hustle to earn more money and send home to her grandma. Eight years passed by.
In the year 2012, her grandmother fell sick and she has then decided to go back to her home-town to take care of her grandmother. She said she want to be her side, accompanying the one who raised her and protected her when she was little, and leave no regrets behind. And she truly misses the peaceful lifestyle in the country side after living a busy city life for eight years.
The start of her video production
After LiZiqi has returned to her hometown, she has to start an internet shop on Taobao to make a living. In order to make more sales, she often make videos about what she sells. The initial video production did not catch much attention until the year 2017, when her videos were better know to the public.
Her video stood out in the period when food video production was rising with her unique style of ‘ancient and farmland”. LiZiqi said that for many people who have left farmland and have not seen how food is originally grown, they are often interested and drawn towards to the relatively primitive lifestyle, which LiZiqi was living. Liziqi cannot be more familiar with how farmers sow in the spring, and nurture in the summer, and harvest in autumn. For those who have not even seen how apples grow on trees, her daily life could be really interesting.
She turns the old trees into furniture, flowers and plants into make up, vegetables into beautiful and delicious food, tree bark to stationary and so much more. Many people admire how she uses her many skills to lead such a fine life.
Many people say that such a lifestyle is exactly what we dream of, after living in the cities for so long. In response to this, LiZiqi said that “this is actually her ideal lifestyle too, for which she has depicted in her videos and hopefully, when her audience watch the video, they feel a sense of relaxation too”.
I, for one, definitively enjoy watching the beautiful scenes we get to see when living in the rural areas, closer to nature. I think many of her fans like me, do miss the beauty of the nature, after being locked in the concrete jumbles for too long. P.S. Actually I live in Sydney Australia, which is why I am really not complaining because nature is half a day’s drive away (even though we barely get the chance to do so).
This unique and innovative style, which was one of the first in the video production industry, has made her videos productions viral and a huge success. She currently has 27 million followers on Weibo (Chinese version of twitter) and 14.6 million subscribers on YouTube.
The hard work
LiZiqi is also a quick learner. For the dishes she does not know how to cook, she would travel miles, across cities, to find the most authentic ways of making them and in the month, invested months of her time and energy. A video of 5 minutes could take her months to make, starting all the way from the very beginning, from how she learns to cook first.
What impressed me is perfectly captured in this video: Shu Embroidery: Traditional Chinese Craft that Has Existed for Thousands of Years.
In this video, she recorded the journal from how she learned from a famous artist and completed her masterpiece, all the way from the beginning of dying the fabric.
Oh man, is there anything that this girl cannot learn?
Controversy
I did not really look into the topic of controversy when researching because I simply hate to read through content of this nature but I guess controversy is not avoidable for celebrities. So I will briefly touch on this.
As her videos gained more attention and popularity, people started to cast doubts on her personality as well as her production, claiming that she is only an actress and the face of the videos, where most of the video production are done by a team of professions, only asking her to “appear and act’.
In response to this, LiZiqi released all of the information around original video recordings of her content creation process, including the number of takes, the number of takes, the number of steps she has taken and even a few times when she was injured. She has revealed that she has taken more than 20,000 original videos for the content, turning her camera on and off for more than 40,000 times etc.
However, this did not quiet the doubters and the increasing controversy has caused her grand-mother a lot of stress and worries.
In May 2017, she has officially announced that she will stop all of her video productions to protect her grand-mother from further worries. This happened when her grand-mother hurt herself when doing some chaos, because she was constantly feeling stressful and worried about the grand-daughter.
After further consideration and calming herself down, she has re-started her video production.
I would not comment too much on this part of the story and all I know is that, I enjoyed watching her videos and I get to watch them for free. So…. I don’t really care whether the videos were made by herself or by a team.
From an internet celebrity, to a successful business women
LiZiqi has now joined a professional multi channel network and getting professional help to manage and leverage on her video production. This further improved the quality of her videos, backed by more support.
She has also started her own company “Ziqi Culture” and started her online store. The online store sells arrange of Chinese traditional food, ranging from chili sauce to deserts. Within two months of opening, the online store has generated more than 1500 million RMB (roughly 300 million AUD) of revenue. This proves how her fans love and support her.
I would say this is really not surprising, considering how popular her channels are. And the business success is probably a natural transition, built on the popularity of her video content.
In conclusion
I really appreciate LiZiqi’s videos exist, for all the relaxation and pure enjoyment it brings to me and all of her other fans.
What I also picked up from her success story is also that for all the moments in our lives, happy or boring, lucky or unfortunate, be it the alone time we spend in the library in our favorite seat, reading through books and and working out mathematical formula, or those late nights when we spend coding and building our own websites and products or like LiZiqi, the skills she learned in her youth that she probably never asked for, all of those will eventually turn out to be a blessing, in one form or another, in some moments in our lives, which we will cherish and appreciate that they happened.
