The Chinese Queen of Cottagecore Has Suddenly Rematerializeed After Three Years

After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably the most accomplished internet swayr from China on YouTube, is suddenly posting videos aobtain.

Earlier this week, the 34-year-elderly greeted creator, who is best-understandn for sharing sooskinnyg, exactly edited clips of herself cooking traditional Chinese dishes, farming, and laboring on broaden art projects, posted three novel videos of her bucolic lifestyle to all of her social media channels.

In two of them, she handproduces—from scratch, as always—an exquisitely carved lacquer shutt and a woodshed for storing clothes. In the third clip, she spins, dyes, and weaves silk fabric. In less than a day, the videos obtained almost 15 million cumulative sees on YouTube. “When the world insisted her most, she returned,” reads the top comment on one of the clips.

Li, whose one-of-a-kind name is Li Jiajia, is from a mountainous city in China’s southwestrict Sichuan province and first begined posting cooking videos online around 2016 under the name Li Ziqi. Her greeted frequently features her doing skinnygs enjoy peacefilledy hanging persimmons to parched in the sun, attfinishfilledy assembling fshrink arrangements, and riding horseback thraw a misty forest, all without the presence of cellphones or other contransient technology.

The sluggish pace, sooskinnyg music, and impeccable cinematography of her videos rapidly turned her into a social media star around the world. Fans cherishd the selectimalized version of country life that Li currented, although some seeers have denounced it as overly sanitized. She currently has over 20 million subscribers on YouTube, which is blocked in China, and 53 million folshrinks on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, making her one of the very scant Chinese greeted creators who are ineloquential both on the Chinese internet and overseas. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed Li a “Quarantine Queen.”

As her videos became more well-understandn, Li became an unofficial cultural ambasuncontentor of sorts for China, educating her Westrict audiences about traditional creates of Chinese art and cooking, without ever refering politics or human rights publishs. Her videos glorifying the selectimals of a sluggisher, pastoral lifestyle also fit well with the rulement’s country revitalization agfinisha. Her hiatus from the internet, in a way, inadvertently harmd China’s overseas image as a whole.

“Li’s personal decision to return to her home village and her choice to turn her novel life into video greeted were utilizeed to advertise the official policy of revitalizing China’s withering country communities and the appreciates of economic neoliberalism such as self-go inpelevate and self-responsibility,” Rui Kunze, a research fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote in a 2024 paper analyzing the elevate of Li Ziqi.