A video about making iron flowers gained over 2 million followers and was played 200 million times on the entire network. Has the "next Li Ziqi" emerged?

These intangible cultural heritages represent China's long history and cultural heritage, have unique national characteristics and artistic charm, and are very worthy of promotion and inheritance. This article describes the relevant content and hopes it will be helpful to you.

The young girl named Jiang Xunqian brought this intangible cultural heritage back to life. She has been making food and intangible cultural heritage videos for three years and has over 30 million fans online. She can make tea, arrange flowers, brew wine, draw sugar paintings, make kites, and even make traditional Miao silver jewelry. After the iron flower became popular, the account ushered in a peak in traffic. According to the data tools of Xinbang, the Douyin account of "Jiang Xunqian (September)" gained 2.15 million fans in 30 days, and the Xiaohongshu account gained more than 300,000 fans in a month.

In the comment section of her videos, the three words "Li Ziqi" were frequently mentioned, and "Li Ziqi has quit the Internet, and she is still alive thanks to September" became a highly praised comment. Perhaps because they both feature food and traditional cultural elements, and a peaceful video style, many people would compare Jiang Xunqian to Li Ziqi. Image from Weibo @江寻千 In the two years since Li Ziqi stopped updating, "Who is the next Li Ziqi" has always been discussed tirelessly. In the past, various rural bloggers appeared, and in the future, traditional craftsmen rose. They all couldn't avoid being compared with Li Ziqi. Although Jiang Xunqian herself doesn't think so, "Those comments may not have seen Li Ziqi much, and they don't see me much. We don't have any similarities from the selection of topics, scenes to the way of video expression", but it can't stop netizens from catching Li Ziqi's "shadow" from her.

1. The first girl who made iron flowers on the Internet

Before Jiang Xunqian, no blogger had ever filmed such a complete experience video of making iron flowers. Two years ago, Jiang Xunqian saw the iron flowers for the first time. The fireworks bloomed in the dark night and she was shocked to tears. Since then, she has had the idea of ​​learning to make iron flowers. At first, people around her disagreed and thought it was too dangerous. Jiang Xunqian repeatedly mentioned it for two years before they agreed. So, she contacted Mr. Yang Jianjun, the representative inheritor of Henan Queshan Iron Flower, through the blogger "Film and Television Hurricane".

Teacher Yang Jianjun has devoted half his life to the inheritance and promotion of iron flower skills. He has spent 13 years visiting Taoist temples and inspecting cultural relics to restore the almost lost willow flower shed for iron flower performances. There was an old rule in iron flower making that for more than a thousand years, it was passed down from men to women. After hearing about Jiang Xunqian's purpose, Teacher Yang Jianjun expressed her willingness to teach more people this skill, but was worried that the iron flower would hurt her.

"Teacher Yang said that there was a boy in the team who injured his cornea while making iron flowers and spent 30,000 to 40,000 yuan on treatment. Another person got molten iron on the instep of his foot, which flowed all the way to his toes, leaving a long scar." But these did not dissuade her from doing this.

In this way, Jiang Xunqian became the first female disciple of Teacher Yang Jianjun.

Making iron flowers is not an easy task. It requires strength, but not just strength. The person making the iron flowers must hit the bottom of the groove where the molten iron is placed, so that the iron flowers can be made high and straight, so that the scattered iron flowers will not easily hurt people. Beginners should start practicing by hitting sand and water. Jiang Xunqian encountered many accidents during the learning process. When she was hitting the stick, it bounced off her arm. After a few days, she found that her arm was bruised and still aching. Another time, sand hit her back, and she was a little scared at that moment: Fortunately, it was sand, if it was molten iron, I really couldn't imagine it.

For a whole month, Jiang Xunqian practiced making iron flowers. She started making them when she woke up in the morning and continued until she went to bed at night. She did not give herself any time to rest and relax. "I even dreamed about making iron flowers at night, and my hands couldn't help making iron flowers when I was eating." She did not set a script for herself, but asked the photographer to record her daily experience . Some interesting details in the video also happened naturally during the day-to-day practice. For example, when she was practicing water, Teacher Yang suddenly called for a stop. She thought something was wrong, but she didn't expect Teacher Yang to quietly open his umbrella for fear of getting wet.

While practicing, Jiang Xunqian was still looking for a suitable place for the final presentation of the iron flower. She asked several places, whether it was a square or an open space, they could not make iron flowers for fire prevention reasons. She finally locked her eyes on the desert, where it was empty and nothing could burn, which could best restore the ultimate romance of making iron flowers. Before actually making iron flowers, she felt scared for the first time. "It was then that I realized that the most difficult part of making iron flowers was not the technique, but overcoming the fear of facing the fire." Jiang Xunqian was worried about accidents, so she looked at the address of the nearest hospital in advance, which was 41 kilometers away. According to tradition, she prayed devoutly to Taishang Laojun under the flower shed not to be injured. The photographer put on a 1500-degree protective flame-retardant suit to follow the scene, and the camera was also protected by protective flame-retardant equipment, and it was recorded throughout the process.

One stick after another, the iron liquid burned to nearly 1600℃ flew into the air, hit the willow branches on the roof, burst and scattered, and bloomed in the dark night. According to regulations, people who make iron flowers cannot look up, and they must dodge immediately after each stick, but she felt great encouragement and courage from the cheers on the scene. After the end, Jiang Xunqian's clothes were torn with many holes, her skin was left with burns, and her hair was burned off, but she felt that everything was worth it. Jiang Xunqian spent 10 days editing the video of making iron flowers . There were no similar videos to refer to, so she went to watch "Kung Fu Panda" and Huang Feihong movies to learn from experience, and drew inspiration from the stories of martial arts in the rivers and lakes where people learn from their masters. At the end of the video, there was no narration, only the iron flowers blooming all over the sky brought the ultimate splendor, "I wanted to say a lot of things at the beginning, but in the end I thought it would be better to leave blank space to give everyone more room for imagination."

2. Food bloggers are "side jobs", while intangible cultural heritage bloggers are "main jobs"

Countless netizens were shocked by the iron flowers. The video was played more than 200 million times on the entire network, and more than 140 million times on the Douyin platform alone. Although the video went viral, Jiang Xunqian was very calm and did not change her creative rhythm. She has been making short videos for three years, and as early as the beginning of 2020, she made her first hit content with 3 million likes. "A lot of things happen in this world every day, but they are just ordinary things in life. I just took one step at a time and slowly accumulated attention."

Before filming the video, she worked as a concept artist at the game company Xishanju. The game industry is a hard one. Jiang Xunqian still remembers that some programmers slept directly in the company at that time. Every time she got off work, it was dark. Occasionally, she would post a circle of friends in surprise when she got off work at dawn. "It was very tiring, and it gradually eroded my love for painting." She decided to change her lifestyle, so she quit her job in 2019 and became a freelance concept artist at home.

Every day her mother would come to ask her if she had eaten and what she had eaten, so she would film the food while cooking and show it to her mother. At first, she had no experience in filming and editing, so she referred to some movies and tried her best.

Many people questioned whether "Jiang Xunqian" was packaged and planned by the team. She was a little helpless. "I am mainly responsible for the content and editing. I only hired photographers and assistants after the account was established. Now there are only 5 people in the team." Until now, Jiang Xunqian feels that her content is a bit "wild" and not professional. However, if she is defined as a food blogger, it is not accurate. She said that her content is not vertical, and she only writes content that she is interested in and wants to learn. Because she has loved traditional culture since she was a child, Jiang Xunqian was influenced by her grandfather and studied Peking Opera for 6 years. After work, she moved from her hometown in Hunan to Guangzhou and joined the local Youth Peking Opera Society. She continued to learn and promote Peking Opera with four or five Peking Opera teachers from the drama club.

In her eyes, Chinese traditional culture has "too many good things" and is closely related to the lives of contemporary people. Even the dumplings and chopsticks we eat every day are part of traditional culture. Whenever she sees an interesting intangible cultural heritage project, Jiang Xunqian will take the initiative to contact the inheritor to learn from him. She has a foundation in art, and many of her skills are similar, such as velvet flowers, paper flowers, and Miao silver hats. They are just different materials, and the production methods are very similar.

She can learn a skill quickly in three or four days, but some take longer, such as sugar painting, which took her three months to learn. Jiang Xunqian cannot estimate how long it will take to learn, but what she hasn't learned cannot be filmed into a video. In addition, she likes to present intangible cultural heritage stories in a narrative way. Each video is about 5-10 minutes long and takes 3-4 days to edit, which often consumes a lot of time. Therefore, Jiang Xunqian basically does not chase hot topics and only shoots at her own pace.

She has not counted how many intangible cultural heritage skills she has learned so far. Every day she thinks about what else she can learn. Her schedule is full, and most of her energy is devoted to intangible cultural heritage.

In order to keep her account updated while learning intangible cultural heritage skills, she would use food videos to fill the gaps . "My food videos are all about simple things. For example, when summer comes, I'll post a watermelon food video. If I only post food content, I can update fifteen or sixteen videos a month."

Although she has almost no time to rest, Jiang Xunqian is very satisfied with her current situation because by learning different intangible cultural heritage skills, she has experienced and gone through different lives.

She also said that she hardly ever worries about lack of inspiration, "I just worry about why I have so little time and how many things I still want to learn."

3. "Li Ziqi" is just a content symbol, traditional culture is the root

After the iron flower video, more and more viewers said that Jiang Xunqian and Li Ziqi look alike. Netizens can always find various similarities, such as appearance, long flowing hair and classical temperament; for example, in terms of content, Li Ziqi goes through spring ploughing, summer weeding, autumn harvest and winter storage to make a dish, and Jiang Xunqian will also spend a year to recreate Yang Guifei's lychee wine, starting from picking lychees.

In Jiang Xunqian's opinion, audiences who truly understand them should be able to see their different ways of expression. Many of the things she tried were the first on the entire Internet, like making iron flowers, which no one had filmed before, so it was difficult to have a template case for reference.

But she also did not deny that both of them used traditional culture as the basis and starting point for the video content, "Our only similarity is Chinese style."

As a benchmark figure in traditional Chinese style content, Liziqi has attracted over 10 million fans across the entire network with her rural life content, and has successfully promoted traditional Chinese culture overseas. She has over 17.4 million YouTube fans.

Li Ziqi's influence has helped break the circle of traditional cultural video content, but for a long time, even if similar creators appeared, it was difficult for anyone to replace her position. Until two years ago, due to a contract dispute with Weinian, Li Ziqi stopped updating, and the former pastoral goddess disappeared for a long time.

However, netizens have never lost their interest in traditional culture and have turned to looking for similar creators, such as Peng Chuanming and Jiang Xunqian. A top MCN practitioner once pointed out that if you look closely at the content of Peng Chuanming and Li Ziqi, there are actually many differences. "Peng Chuanming is more inclined to the spiritual direction of a small person, and he is not copying Li Ziqi."

The editorial department of Xinbang also published an article analyzing that Li Ziqi's success itself is not something that can be achieved by chance. Compared with the amount of traffic on the account itself, the profound impact she brings is that she has lowered the threshold for traditional cultural content to be accepted by the market .

Jiang Xunqian believes that today's young people are very interested in traditional culture, especially intangible cultural heritage. "They are willing to learn about it, but they lacked access to it before." Therefore, whether it is Li Ziqi or Jiang Xunqian, the reason why they are loved by the audience is that they shorten the distance between them and traditional culture, show the "peaceful years" that many people yearn for, and eventually become a spiritual sustenance.

This type of content often means a lot of time and even production costs, and it is difficult to generate commercial income in the early stages, which is why it is difficult to replicate in large quantities, and cost-effectiveness is a big problem. Jiang Xunqian believes that people who can make this type of content are those who truly love traditional culture. "It may look idealistic in the video, but I am actually a very realistic person. Without money, there is no dream."

She does not reject advertising. Only with income can she support her team, learn more intangible cultural heritage skills, get in touch with more traditional culture, and do what she really loves. On this basis, Jiang Xunqian also wants to help intangible cultural heritage inheritors live a better life. Last month, she received a text message from an intangible cultural heritage inheritor asking if she could help sell some intangible cultural heritage handicrafts. The sales were not good and she was running out of money and materials. This made her feel deeply, "I also want to help commercialize intangible cultural heritage skills. Only by making money can they be better passed on."

Author: Yun Feiyang; Editor: Truffle; Proofreader: Xiaoba

Source: Newrank (ID: newrankcn)