International Yoga Day 2017: How China is going gaga over yoga
When the late yoga guru BKS Iyengar visited China in 2011, he was struck by the reception — wherever he went, he was mobbed by thousands of yoga fans, mostly young Chinese, and he found that all of his books had been translated and widely read in the Middle Kingdom.
Then, the yoga guru, who passed away in 2014, said he believed that so wide was the patronage for yoga in China that in the future, it could have more yoga practitioners than India.
The scale of this following has been on display over the past few days in the lead-up to the June 21 International Day of Yoga, an event that has in some sense taken on a life of its own in China. Several thousand yoga schools in the country have seized upon it as an opportunity to spread their message.
In six cities in eastern China, from Shanghai to Hangzhou and Wenzhou, more than 30,000 people participated in events organised by the consulate in Shanghai, with a signature event, held against the breathtaking backdrop of the Dongtou pavilion on the banks of a river in Wenzhou, attracting several thousand people who came to listen to lessons from teachers of the Krishnamachari Yoga Mandiram.
And on Tuesday, June 20, morning, yoga came to the Great Wall of China for the first time, with young Chinese practitioners gathering against its stunning backdrop to promote yoga, along with 20 young yoga ambassadors from India, 10 girls and 10 boys under 30 years of age selected by the Ministry of AYUSH and the Morarji Desai National Institute of Yoga.
What’s behind the following?
The Chinese government is also apparently intrigued. This month, a first-ever official study about the yoga phenomenon will be released. Sharing some of its findings, one of the authors, Zhang Yongjian, a senior researcher at the official Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Mail Today he found more than 10,800 yoga schools in China and millions of practitioners. And these are just the major schools.
As he notes, almost every local neighbourhood gym now also offers yoga lessons, even if the standard of teaching could be suspect. The other interesting takeaway from the “China Yoga Industry Development Report” is on the profile of yoga followers – young, female, affluent and living in the big city.
“We found that the popularity of yoga was highly related with a city’s economic development,” he said, with wealthy Beijing, Shanghai and southern Guangdong province home to the most number of yoga practitioners. The lowest number was found in poorer provinces and in the western hinterland, in Qinghai, Xinjiang and Tibet.
There were exceptions — one such curious anomaly was the relatively poor northeast, with the provinces of Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning having many yoga schools. “This was very surprising,” Zhang said. He speculated it could be related to the widely held national perception of young women in China’s northeast “being very health and beauty conscious”.
Yin Yan, founder of YogiYoga, who set up one of China’s biggest yoga schools, which operates in 17 provinces, discovered yoga on a trip to Rishikesh where she met a yoga guru Manmohan Singh Bhandari. They returned to China together and started YogiYoga.
“There’s no doubt that the yoga explosion is growing rapidly,” she says. Bhandari considers himself a follower BKS Iyengar, who will be happy to note that his legacy is indeed living on in China.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)