In search of "The Drunken Butterfly"

A couple of days ago, while scrolling through Google Photos on my mobile, I found a video that I had saved long ago. 

It's an exercise sequence. 

In the video, which is around six-and-half minutes long, you will find the same exercise sequence repeated by nine persons in nine different settings. 

I recalled that it was sent to me by someone on WhatsApp during the Covid days. Since I had liked it, I had saved it in my Google Photos.

When I found this video a couple of days ago, I was quite curious as to what the song is, from which country it is, and also if this is any popular exercise sequence or dance form.

The only clue were some words, probably Chinese, superimposed on the video.

I gave an image search on Google to see if this video already existed on the Internet. But I couldn't find any results.

In order to know what the words are, and also to understand more about the image, I used Google Lens. 

The words are Chinese, and the Lens app threw up translations like: Look at the numbers - Lesson dance - Drunk butterfly.

That was some progress!

Encouraged by that, I gave a Google search for 'Drunk butterfly'.

On Spotify, I found an album "Drunk Butterfly" and a song "Drunken Butterfly" by Sonic Youth an American rock band.

I also found, images of, obviously, butterflies. 

The search also threw up images of plants and flowers.

I then refined the search as "drunk butterfly exercise".

Then I got videos and images of various exercise poses. Nothing even remotely similar to what was in that video.

I refined the search further thus: "drunk butterfly exercise Chinese".

The first result was this video posted on Bilibili. It's a Shanghai-based video-sharing website.

The music is the same as in the WhatsApp video. But it's animation and not real people.

Below the Bilibili result, I found this video on YouTube. It's titled 'Drunken Butterfly'.

The music is the same. Now, real people are doing a dance sequence. 

It's clearly an exercise, because, using Google Lens, I figured out phrases in Chinese like 'lose weight at home' were superimposed on the video.

I continued my search on YouTube with different keywords.

And I found this one, that seemed to give some information. 

It has the lyrics of the song in Pinyin (Mandarin written in Roman/Latin script), and also its English translation.

This website says Chinese song The Drunken Butterfly (Jiu Zui De Hu Die, in Chinese) is sung by Cui Wei Li, and the lyrics and music composition are by Liu Hai Dong. The website has the lyrics and English translation.

Later, I found on YouTube the video I had got on WhatsApp two years ago.

I also noticed that most of The Drunken Butterfly videos were uploaded on YouTube in mid-2020, when Covid struck.

Looks like it became popular when people were locked up in their homes and were desperate to do some exercise.