YUGOULIANG, China — As the top Chinese official in this village, Lu Wenzhen had a problem. The young people had moved away. The remaining elderly farmers were ailing. His hamlet needed money. Life. A spark.

Then, two years ago, he watched a 60-year-old woman sit cross-legged for half an hour on a kang, a stone bed common in the northern countryside. Mr. Lu had a eureka moment.

«Yoga,» he said.

It was an audacious plan that seemed out of place in Yugouliang, a village of fewer than 100 people in Hebei Province, far from the gyms and health food stores in places like Beijing and Shanghai. It is so remote that the closest train station is two hours away. The internet had just arrived two years ago. The average age of a Yugouliang resident is 65. They survive by tending to their cows and sheep and small plots of land.

In rural China, at least 50 million older Chinese have been left behind by the country’s economic boom, official data shows. Many struggle with poverty and depression.

Yoga? The residents in Yugouliang were unconvinced. They had never heard of yoga. Was Secretary Lu, as they called him, trying to recruit them into a cult?

There was another wrinkle: Mr. Lu, 52, had never taken a yoga class. «I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that I didn’t know how to do it,» he said.

The internet was his guide. He watched videos and looked at photos. He knew that getting older farmers to do yoga would be tricky. He bought gloves and yoga mats to entice them.

Those first few sessions, just a few residents turned up. Mr. Lu started off slow. First he taught them breathing exercises. Then he tried simple, cross-legged moves.

It didn’t take long for more people to join. Nor did it take long for them to try more ambitious poses.

In February 2017, the State General Administration of Sports gave Yugouliang the title of «China’s first yoga village.» But it wasn’t until the end of last year that Mr. Lu felt his residents were good enough to compete. He entered them into a yoga competition in Shijiazhuang, the provincial capital. They won an award for being the «best collective team.»

The government has said it is giving Mr. Lu $1.5 million for a nursing home and a yoga pavilion. But his goal of setting off a tourism boom could be difficult to achieve. The village is hard to reach and there are no amenities to speak of. Still, Mr. Lu sees positives. Yoga-strengthened residents, he said, save on medical costs.

Yoga has become part of the daily routine. Many practice at 5:30 a.m., then let their cows and sheep out to pasture, followed by breakfast, farming, lunch, rest, farming, evening yoga at 5:30, then dinner.

Mr. Lu was sent to work in Yugouliang in 2016, part of the party’s longtime practice of sending cadres to less developed areas. Like hundreds of other cadres in rural China, he was tasked with alleviating poverty by 2020, one of President Xi Jinping’s campaigns.

In Yugouliang, Jing Wanshan, 68, said years of walking from putting his sheep out to pasture caused his legs to hurt. Previously, he struggled to run two or three laps around the exercise square. Now he can do 20.

Mr. Lu said he wants to turn Yugouliang into a yoga training base for farmers from all over China, which he says will draw tourists as well.

«All these are dreams for now,» Mr. Lu said. «But one has to have dreams.»

He provided mats and lessons, and the residents came.

© 2018 The New York Times