LiZiqi – Soothing Subjects

Unless you happen to be Chinese, you probably have no idea who this woman is. In China, she is a huge internet star.

Li Ziqi is a lovely young woman of many, many talents. She appears to be a sort of Asian fairy princess growing and cooking her own food, foraging in the woods, making furniture from bamboo, weaving, growing silk worms then harvesting the silk to use in bedding she makes by hand for her beloved grandmother. What this young woman accomplishes and creates, makes Martha Stewart look lazy…and that’s really saying something!

But though her videos are very interesting and informational, what sets them apart from other types of DIY type videos is their ethereal quality. LiZiqi well understands the need for those who watch her videos to escape the pressures and stress of ordinary life. Her life, the one she has created and films, is anything but ordinary.

But it hasn’t always been beauty and grace in her life. She endured a difficult childhood, at one point alone and living under a bridge working multiple jobs to survive. She eventually returned to the countryside home of her beloved grandparents when her grandmother became ill. That’s when she began to use the kitchen, homemaking, gardening, and furniture making skills she had learned very early on in life from her grandparents, to engage in the storytelling of the videos she now creates.

There is a soothing, almost mesmerizing, quality to her videos. In the beginning she shot them all herself, propping her phone up to use the camera to film herself. Now, several years and millions of social media followers later, she has someone else holding the camera and following her to capture the magic. But it is still a very tight circle of those involved in her projects to keep the atmosphere that is evident in this life she is now living.

Here are a couple of samples of her work:

If you are anything like we are, you can’t stop yourself from watching this lovely, and graceful young woman. Though You Tube is banned in China, her videos appear on a state run internet service there, and so she has amassed a huge following in China. Fortunately, for those of us outside of China, many of her videos have made their way to You Tube for us to enjoy. You can simply go to You Tube and type LiZiqi in the search bar. There you can subscribe to the LiZiqi You Tube channel and watch to your heart and minds content. (We recommend highly the video of her growing, and harvesting cotton and using it to make a warm and cozy mattress for her sweet grandmother and her dog. Just type in “LiZiqi grows cotton” in the search bar or click here).

Few of us will ever attempt to make our own silk bedding, or our own noodles by hand, but we can all sit back and enjoy watching Li Ziqi do it and dream about a life as lovely and peaceful and gracious as the one she appears to be living. So grab a cup of tea and prepare to be transported to a world few of us will ever experience first hand…the world according to LiZiqi. A world that exudes love, joy and hard work and some very abundant living.