As an old saying goes, the morning hours are the best time of the day to work. But before work, a satisfying breakfast is very important. A new food documentary is showing that in China, you have one hundred ways to eat your breakfast.

The documentary in question is titled “Breakfast in China”. Following the success of “A Bite of China”(a TV series on the history of food, eating, and cooking in China directed by Chen Xiaoqing), the latest hit focuses on breakfast. It takes audiences on a journey to find the most popular local breakfast dishes at morning markets across China.

The show has 100 episodes and each episode is only 5-8 minutes long. Produced by Haixia TV and Tencent, the first series is available on Tencent Video. “We are living a fast-paced life. A long documentary lasting 30 to 50 minutes takes up time. So unlike some food documentaries created from the macro perspective, we try to tell a wonderful story via a short video of 5 to 8 minutes, so that office workers can enjoy it during their leisure time,” said Zhu Lexian, producer of “Breakfast in China”.

Each episode features one single breakfast shop which has become part of the local people’s daily lives. In Changsha, Hunan province, the show focuses on a pork rice noodle shop, where the side dishes are stewed in a clay pot for five hours. In Kaili, Guizhou province, the locals line up at 6 a.m. to eat a bowl of sour rice noodles. In Shantou, Guangdong province, the pork blood soup is made from the freshest materials. These breakfast shops are not fancy restaurants. They look unimpressive, but they are indispensable.

（Pork rice noodles）

(Pork blood soup)

The show’s official account on Chinese social media Weibo has attracted over 45,000 followers and articles on this documentary have been viewed over 200 million times so far.

(A sour rice noodle casserole)

With their mouths watering, many netizens have shown off their hometown breakfast foods and competed with each other. Some foodies even took advantage of the May Day holiday to travel to different places just for a bite of those foods which had appeared in the documentary.

Speaking of the motive of making the documentary, the director Wang Shengzhi said that was because of the post-90s generation in his team. “They have breakfast casually. Just wake up and then find something to eat, and then go to work by bus or subway. I want to introduce to the younger generation the diversity of Chinese breakfasts and how they cheer people up at the beginning of a day.”