Every independent traveller since Marco Polo is dogged by the feeling that they’ve missed the boat/cart/camel. For backpackers, their nirvana is impossibly transient – dirt cheap, little touched by modernity (or other travellers), but with somewhere to get a bed, a beer, a cheap feed and a good time. Gone in the blink of a sweet-smelling cigarette.

In Beijing, where I’ve lived for seven years, I lament the city’s disappearing hutong alleyways and heritage architecture to anyway who’ll listen. One day a friend gave me a book, In Search of Old Peking, in which the British and American authors do exactly the same. It was published in 1935.

But if your eyes get misty with nostalgia you might just miss something special beginning to sprout. And something special is happening in Dali right now.

A little way north of Dali Old Town, among the ghosts of the caravan trails to Lijiang and the sacred Meili mountain range, a white-walled Bai village climbs the rocky slope towards the Azure Mountains. The old stone farmhouses, mostly abandoned, are forlorn and tomb-like. Walking through the labyrinth of tangled pathways is like creeping back in time, and just as I’m ready to give up, a voice calls out from behind a wall.

Inside is a grinning Frenchman, Gil Gonzalez Foerster, and a vegetable garden ablaze with peppers, pumpkins, celery, broad beans, wild green spinach, red spinach, thyme and sage (‘over a dozen tomato varieties’, he notes), and at the heart of it all, his purpose-built kitchen, the engine room of Cassa Bai, a private dining enterprise.

Gonzalez Foerster cooks al fresco for private groups and events – ‘small scale, small profile’ – in between scribbling away on a book about his years working in human rights. What he doesn’t grow himself, he procures from the old market square at Bo Ai Lu in Dali, cycling the 20-kilometre round trip with a Bai woven basket on his back.

‘My landlord said I was wasting my time, that nothing would grow here because the soil under the concrete hasn’t seen the sun for 20 years,’ he says. ‘But this is the second season and look. The rain, the sun – you can grow almost anything in Dali.’