Flights of fancy

In October 2018, a 26-year-old female IT engineer won the jackpot in a lottery launched by Alipay on China's major social media platform Sina Weibo. She became an overnight web sensation.

The prizes included shoes, clothes, phones and cosmetic products, as well as free luxury accommodation and flight tickets to countries in Asia, North America, Africa and Europe, most of which would be invalid if not claimed within a year.

The official account of Alipay released a Sina Weibo post to announce the prize list and all online users who reposted the post had a chance to win.

This resulted in it being reposted by more than 3 million participants. The winner, known online as Xinxiaodai, was the lucky one in late 2018.

Her excitement was evident in a post after being named as the winner. "Should I stop going to work for the rest of my life?" Her post attracted many hundreds of thousands of fellow users to comment.

She quickly decided to quit her job at a State-owned enterprise and claimed as many prizes as she could within the year.

Before that, she had never been abroad. She soon made up for it as she visited Japan, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand and recorded her experiences via video blogs, which drew more than 1.3 million followers on Sina Weibo.

However, she only managed to claim half of the travel-related prizes and she spent a lot of her own savings on the foreign trips. She also found out the intensive itinerary was exhausting, had taken a toll on her health, and public interest in her posts was waning. What could she do after a year of jet-setting? Her life has changed but to what extent, we are yet to see.