THESE DAYS, everything comes from China. However, the phrase also fits the distant past. In autumn, I began reading a book on this topic, “The Man Who Loved China,” by noted writer Simon Winchester. However, lately I have found the phrase better illustrated by a set of soothing, well-made, five-minute videos. They are from an exceptional young Chinese woman who makes traditional things—housewares and Sichuan cooking—by hand.To get more li ziqi, you can visit shine news official website.
Creating mainly for Chinese viewers, the video blogger’s name is liziqi, transliterated as Li Tuqi or Li Ziqi. These translate roughly to Seven Plums. A Mandarin speaker I met by chance while struggling with the third, rare character explained that it might come from her mother’s surname.
Regardless of the specific reading, the name fits, for Ms. Li is a master of multiple traditional disciplines. She pursues her crafts at her grandmother’s farm in the mountainous countryside near Mianyang, Sichuan Province, China.
As much of Seven Plums’ work is in Chinese, she remains scarcely known in the West. Yet, like Mari Kondo of home-tidiness fame, she is building a global following. This is because her largely Chinese-language presentation is not an impediment to international viewing. The language appears only in episode titles, and occasionally as explanatory subtitles. For Ms. Li is among the rare breed of YouTube “vloggers” who does not speak. Instead, she lets her deft hands tell the story.
In addition to the lack of dialogue, four additional features set Seven Plums’ videos apart. First, like the similar Japanese “Little Forest” films, each venture begins at an early starting point. For example, an episode on roasting mushrooms opens inexplicably on Ms. Li hauling bricks and troweling cement between them. Only later do non-kanji readers realize that she is first making the needed outdoor barbecue. Other adventures begin with her donning boots, then setting out for the fields or forest with only a straw basket and a her meat cleaver, which doubles as a hand ax.
Second, throughout such work, you see no power tools, nor use of electricity. The focus is on adept hand work, accomplishing tasks as they might have been done two or more generations ago. Thus, all cooking, no matter how elaborate, is done on wood-fired stoves.
Third, there is the amazing breadth of the projects Ms. Li takes on. Besides construction and cooking, she produces cosmetics, dresses, needlecraft, silk blankets, and even a pair of shoes.
Last, there is the marvelous cinematography. Close-in shots of the work are interwoven with charming pastoral scenes and whimsical ones that reveal glimpses of Ms. Li’s personality. We see the Mianyang hills in the early morning light. We meet the family dog, neighborhood cats, sheep, and cows. Grandma makes cameo appearances as the lucky diner of each elaborately prepared meal.
To sample a few of Ms. Li’s videos, simply type her name into the
search box at Google or YouTube. If you like the few dozen videos you
can find that way and want to see more, then you will have to find her
YouTube home page. There, her complete set of 72 available videos
awaits. To do so, simply click on her three-character name or icon—a
girl in a red riding hood—from anywhere within YouTube. If you’ve gone
this far, you might as well add yourself to her subscriber list (free),
which 2.9 million worldwide have already done, including me. This way
you can have the pleasure of seeing her new videos when they first
appear.One approach to viewing the videos would be to do so in
chronological order, earliest to latest. That way, you can see the
housewares that she makes in earlier episodes appear in later ones—like
characters in a movie—as well as the gradual evolution of her video
craft.
Alternatively, one can pick and choose. To date, my top four favorite
handcrafts episodes are those covering ancient paper-making, wood-block
printing, sericulture, and bamboo furniture making.
Among the cooking episodes, all I have seen inspire me to eat more vegetables, which is no small feat! The one on making ramen is essential viewing; it is titled, “A Bowl of Art.” As a Japanese American, I also find the episode on roasted mushrooms that starts with hauling bricks especially intriguing. Are the brownish-white pine mushrooms that Ms. Li pokes out from beneath moss related to our identically written matsutake ?
