A small village in China has adopted yoga not only to cure illnesses, but also find a life of prosperity. The yoga story of Yugouliang, an impoverished village in northern China’s Hebei province, around 300 km northwest of Beijing, has attracted a lot of attention in the backdrop of less strained India-China ties.
Earlier this week, China’s ambassador to India, Luo Zhaohui, tweeted about Yugouliang’s yoga obsession, underlining the “deep roots” of the India-China relationship.
Yugouliang, home to fewer than 100 permanent residents, witnessed at least 60 of its residents becoming yoga enthusiasts. Due to lack of natural resources and low groundwater level, Yugouliang has not been able to attract much investment. The villagers are mainly farmers who cultivate potatoes and oats, with some also tending to livestock. The village is home mostly to the elderly, since the young have left to work in cities.
Already short on money, farmers often exhaust their savings on healthcare. This is where the role of 52-year-old Lu Wenzhen comes in. Wenzhen was sent by the government to Yugouliang to study poverty factors and find out how to ensure the village’s financial growth.
Wenzhen told the local Chinese media that it was upon observing the villagers’ habit to sit cross-legged for long hours that he came up with the idea of teaching them yoga to help them improve their health in order to cut down on their medical bills. Wenzhen learnt yoga from online tutorials and helped the villagers adopt the new physical art.
Starting with a small group of women, now Wenzhen’s classes are attended by a majority of the villagers.
Due to yoga’s success here, Yugouliang is expected to be converted into a yoga-themed retirement home, as reported by English China News Service.
In China, yoga is among those few things Indian that have found their way into the heart of the Chinese. Until now, yoga had been a trend only in China’s big cities, but now Chinese villages, too, are looking towards yoga as an alternative health routine.
Urban Chinese women in particular have adopted yoga as their primary fitness routine in the last few years. In May 2017, “China Yoga Industry Development Report” revealed that close to 10,800 yoga schools had opened across China. The report also highlighted the direct relation between the financial status of a province and its residents’ yoga engagement, enumerating that yoga’s success in China had a direct relationship with prosperous city life.
However, now yoga is entering China’s villages as well. India’s “yoga diplomacy” has been repeatedly recognised by Chinese scholars and columns of its state-owned publication Global Times.