"I just want people to relax and experience something nice when they are streaming my videos, and hopefully the videos can take away some of their anxiety and stress," Li Ziqi, the popular vlogger living in southwest China's Sichuan Province said in an interview with the Goldthread, a social media outlet on Chinese culture.

The 29-year-old recently gained recognition both at home and abroad for her video recordings of life in her hometown of Mianyang, the second largest prefecture-level city in the province. She has millions of followers on YouTube and Bilibili, a Chinese video sharing platform.

Unlike more popular short videos, each of Li's videos usually lasts 10 minutes, recording an elaborate process of meal preparation from cultivating the basic ingredients to sharing the food with her grandmother in the backyard, and some handicrafts, like the China's "scholar's four jewels," – namely the writing brush, ink stick, ink slab and paper.

In most of her videos, she seldom speaks but simply shows the way she relishes her idyllic life with her grandmother, with traditional Chinese music and natural sounds playing in the background. The backdrops are usually the backyard of her house or extensive mountains and clear waters, where she mostly dons traditional Han costumes and use the simplest tools to make food.

The perfect fusion of makeup, image and sound stands in stark contrast to other more popular videos. The idyllic setting and lifestyle also cast doubts as to whether she is portraying Chinese rural life authentically. Some hold the opinion that what Ziqi displays in her videos is an ideal that people are seeking after.

"I'm filming myself. Or I'm filming the life that I am pursuing," Ziqi said in the interview and admitted that professional videographers were involved but added they were all directed by her.

The criticism did not stop at the filming but rippled to her co-branded products, with some saying the products featured are not from her hometown of Sichuan.

Born in 1990, Ziqi lost her father at the age of six and left home to earn a living eight years later when she was only 14. In 2012, Ziqi came back to her home in the village to look after her grandmother. And in 2016, she started filming her life.

"When I worked in a city, it was about survival. Now when I am in a village, it's truly for living," said Ziqi when asked about her decision to return home. 

Ziqi's filming of her life with her grandmother has also trended overseas since she uploaded her first video on YouTube two years ago, despite the fact that most of her videos are in Chinese. Each of her videos has amassed thousands of comments.

"Why she can do everything… She’s a real wonder woman" Shayne Ward writes below Ziqi's first YouTube video.

"She is living a life which ideally should be life of everyone," Gaurav Mehata commented on YouTube.

"She is all I watched while I was pregnant with my first child. I'm always rewatching her videos not only because she's amazing but the sounds and music remind me of the nights I'd stay up watching her and feeling my baby kick,”Stephanie Harper, a mother shared when she first watched Ziqiis videos during her pregnancy.

Li Ziqi's life narrative has helped her create a meme on overseas social media with some vloggers even starting to imitate the way she presents her life. An opinion story published on WeChat writes: "It's Li Ziqi's affection for life that made her videos widely spread, although there is no translation for subtitles or descriptions."