URUMQI - Each evening, 29-year-old Azgul Eyni finds herself constantly glancing at the clock, waiting for it to strike 9.

As a mother of two and a stall operator in a night market, Azgul Eyni takes care of her children in the daytime and prepares ingredients for the local delicacies she will sell by night.

As the hour hand ticks over at long last, she heads to the night market to run her stall with bags of ingredients in tow. As she prepares her food, she chats with her customers -- mostly people from nearby villages, and sometimes tourists from afar.

From 9 pm to around 2 am she flits back and forth between roasting eggs on charcoal grills and topping traditional homemade rice puddings with honey and yogurt. A lantern hangs from a wooden bar of her stall and a WeChat Pay QR code is plastered on the wall behind her.