An eight-episode documentary Taste Humanity at Night is airing on the streaming site, Tencent Video, and focuses on exploring stories about night-time delicacies.

Four episodes have been released introducing delicacies from Shenyang, Wuhan, Nanning and Xiamen, while the upcoming four episodes will focus on Xi'an, Chongqing, Hangzhou and Guangzhou.

In the first episode, the most eye-catching dish in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, is chicken skeleton. Whether grilled, fried or smoked, the chicken skeleton is a favorite of locals in the city.

"Decades ago when food was in short supply, people in Shenyang didn't want to throw the chicken skeleton away, so they created different ways to cook it, and now it has become a delicacy in the city," one interviewee explains.

Du Xing, director of the documentary, trains his lens on diners tucking into the dish around midnight-a female driver orders chicken skeleton and a bowl of noodles after work to eat with her colleagues.

Du titled the first episode Fierce Shenyang, which he says captures the essence of the northeastern city. The 38-year-old director tries to discover the character of each city he films in-Wuhan is magnanimous; Xiamen is exquisite and Chongqing is fearless.

Du wanted to shoot a documentary about nightlife in China several years ago, as he thinks that at night people show a different side, but he could not find the right angle to tell the story.

One night in the fall of 2017, when Du was looking for food options in a hutong in Beijing, he noticed a light in the middle of the dark alley.

Du says he was inspired by seeing diners climb up a ladder to buy food from the window of a Sichuan snack restaurant when the doors were closed.

The documentary was originally called Humanity of Night but it was later changed by Du's team to add the word "taste".

"Food is the entry point for the documentary, and we want to tell stories of people who enjoy food at night," says Du.

The most difficult part of making the documentary was to find protagonists in each city. Du and his team spent weeks making field trips to each city visiting as many restaurants as possible to observe and talk to people.

"We focused on ordinary people's stories, so we did not search for restaurants on review platforms. In Shenyang, my colleague and I just jumped on a bike and wandered the streets for days to find our stories," says Du.

Zhu Lexian, producer of the documentary, thinks Taste Humanity at Night presents the nightlife of cities that people may not normally see when they travel there.

Zhu, general manager of the documentary studio at Tencent Penguin Pictures, is also the producer of the first two seasons of A Bite of China, and Once Upon a Bite.

He notes that food documentaries in China are becoming more diverse. Now, the length of an episode can vary from 10 minutes to an hour, and the content changes with the subject, such as breakfast or night snacks.