“The Olympic Games?” she asked, apparently perplexed that anyone would bring up such a subject at harvest time on these prime tea-growing slopes in coastal Zhejiang province. “With all I have to do these days, how could I pay attention to the Olympic Games?”

Yi, 54, has always spent her days in Fan Shen, part of a timeless China dominated by the seasons of the year, the rhythms of farm life and the joys and sorrows of raising a family. For her, and for many of her generation in the vast Chinese countryside, the Olympics have proved a distant echo, another propaganda theme from the Government that has little to do with getting in the crops on a hot August day.

About two-thirds of China’s 1.3 billion people have remained tied to farming villages, despite the economic boom of the last 30 years. Focused on their land and their crops, many of them have felt little in common with the glitter of the Olympics, the $40 billion makeover of Beijing and the nationalist pride of their countrymen as China strides onto the international stage and take its place as a world power.

Most foreigners in China, particularly those participating in or attending the Olympics, have come into contact with a recently emerged modern nation of skyscrapers, traffic-clogged streets and increasingly outward-looking people with money to spend. But most Chinese have yet to enter that world. Theirs still revolves around the land, leaving, as Yi said, little time for Olympics festivities promoted by the Communist Party.

Auditing firms announced that up to two-thirds of the Chinese viewing public watched the Olympics’ opening ceremonies. The state-controlled Chinese television system sent the ceremonies out live across the country on multiple channels, leaving little choice. But the elderly farmers and tea merchants here apparently went to bed early that night.

“This time of year, we’re just too busy,” said Wen Xing, 44, who was selling watermelons and squash from a truck bed alongside the main road running through the village.

Some Fan Shen residents, the eldest among its 600 families, did not recognise the Mandarin Chinese word for Olympics being held in Beijing. When it was translated into their Zhejiang dialect, they smiled and nodded but showed no particular sign of enthusiasm.

It is not that Fan Shen, surrounded by neatly terraced hillsides just inland from the East China Sea, has not enjoyed its share of benefits from China’s meteoric economic progress.

Previously known as one of Zhejiang’s poorest and most remote backwaters, the hills around here have become more prosperous since the Government built a concrete road connecting with the highway to the nearby port of Ningbo, allowing trucks to carry tea down to market more easily and buses to carry tourists up to scenic overlooks.

Reflecting the recent prosperity, several little grocery stores have opened up selling packaged foods to complement the melons, corn and mutton available locally. The merchants have even begun to stock store-bought tea — red tea in plastic bottles with sweetener and lemon flavor already mixed in.

“Life here is good,” said a man walking down the road.

Perhaps most important to the future of Fan Shen, the new road has meant children can easily take the bus down to the secondary school in a neighbouring town, opening vistas for village children that their parents never imagined.

Among this younger generation, the call of the Beijing Olympics has been heard.

Xiu Lifen, 20, said the Communist Party, working through county, village and education officials, organised Olympics-related activities at local schools, including sports tournaments pitting the children of one village against those from another. As a result he has taken an interest in the Games, particularly basketball, and has been watching matches regularly on television.

“We are peasants, and we don’t have enough money for that,” he said. So far, he said, he has made himself useful around the house while his parents tend the family tea plantation up the hillside. But the horizon of what might lie beyond Fan Shen has begun to beckon. For millions of young Chinese from villages like this one, it is a future in the assembly factories of the Pearl River Delta.