Xizhou (the name means “happy town”) is a sleepy-looking place with an impressive history, on the shores of Erhai Lake, 12 miles north of the larger and better-known city of Dali. To get there, you either fly nonstop from Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong to Lijiang and then drive two or three hours, or you fly to Kunming, stay overnight, and fly to Dali the next day (the flights are morning-only, so you can’t make the trip in one day). There are normal Chinese hotels in the vicinity, but most Westerners will prefer the Linden Centre, at about $100 a night.

Through the long era of trade in tea and horses between this part of China and Tibet and Burma, Xizhou was an enclave for prosperous merchants, officials, and scholars. The people of the region are mainly from the Bai ethnic group; Bai cities have a distinct architectural style, with sharply arched roofs and richly decorated tile work and wall paintings. During World War II, the Yale-in-China campus ended up in Xizhou, for safety from the oncoming Japanese. When Flying Tigers aviators flew supplies from Burma to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in Chungking (now Chongqing), American radio and radar operators in Xizhou were one of their first points of contact after they made it over the Himalayan hump.

The crumbly radar complex is still there—the Lindens hope to make it a museum—and so are Yale’s old Bai-style buildings. All around those structures and the courtyard compound the Lindens have bought is an expanse of paddy land that stretches to Erhai Lake on one side and to the Himalayan foothills on the other. In arid northern and western China, to depend on the land for sustenance is to be poor. In Xizhou the soil is so rich, the rain so steady, and the climate so mild that the valley has a sense of rural abundance like that of the American Midwest. In poor farm villages of the drylands, children wear rubber flip-flops or often-repaired hand-me-down shoes. The shoes we saw on children’s feet in Xizhou looked stylish and new.

In Xizhou, the Lindens worked with party officials to secure something rarely accorded foreigners: the right to use a “Class A” historical relic and restore it—its tiling, wooden arches and fretwork, painted murals. The buildings survived the 1960s because a People’s Liberation Army detachment had encamped there, keeping out the Red Guards. The Lindens have invested their savings in the faith that the rest of the town will be restored in similar taste—as local officials assure them—making the Linden Centre and Xizhou an internationally appealing cultural destination.

This is a big assumption in today’s China, where the population is rich enough to travel domestically in huge numbers but where the aesthetic of travel is unrefined by Western standards. People travel in big groups, on big buses, behind guides with flags, to a prescribed list of “famous” sites. Across China, “ancient” villages are being redeveloped in a kitschy, gift-shop-heavy way epitomized by Lijiang, 100 miles north of Xizhou, a favorite stop of many Chinese tour groups and a disappointment to most Westerners. On my first visit to Xizhou, Brian Linden assured me that the local officials had all “learned from Lijiang” and were planning to do something “really authentic and classy.” On my second visit, I wandered into a real-estate showroom complete with models of a new housing estate to be built in “Ancient Xizhou.” I hope the Lindens have bet right.