SANGKE GRASSLANDS (China), Aug 24 — The campsite called Norden here on the Tibetan plateau is not quite as spare as the tent homes of nomads who drive yaks across these wind-scrubbed pastures.

The cabins and yak wool tents have wooden floors, custom-made felt blankets and access to hot showers. An American bartender in a new lounge with blond wood furniture mixes a cocktail called the Cloudy Nomad (barley wine and honey).

This year, the camp also opened a yoga centre that doubles as a communal dining hall. A sauna sits nearby.

Needless to say, this is not your typical business on the plateau. Norden Camp is the first site for "glamping,” or glamorous camping, in the vast Chinese-ruled Tibetan region, one of the most austere parts of the world.

"In the high-end market, it’s difficult to get heard out there and reach the right people,” said Dechen Yeshi, 34, who runs the camp with her husband, Yidam Kyap, also 34. "We had to ask ourselves the question: What is luxury?”

On a moonlight night, yak felt tents at Norden Camp, a glamorous camping, or ‘glamping,’ experience available on the Sangke Grasslands of the Tibetan plateau in China July 20, 2016. — Picture by Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times

The camp was built at more than 10,000 feet in a clearing of yellow wildflowers near Yidam’s ancestral home, in the region that Tibetans call Amdo. "It was so challenging to set this thing up here in the middle of nowhere,” Dechen said. (Tibetans prefer to be known by their given name.)

The camp and a carpet workshop in the area’s main town, Xiahe, are the newest pieces of an ambitious social enterprise started by the Yeshi family, which has a mother-daughter team at its heart.

I first heard about the Tibetan-American family from a filmmaker friend, Ruby Yang, and travelled this summer to Gansu province to meet them. The camp is next to a road leading to Xiahe and its famous sprawling Tibetan monastery, Labrang.

The family opened the camp in 2013 to raise revenue for its core enterprise — a textile-weaving business called Norlha that employs mostly women from a nearby village.

The Yeshi family has its immediate roots in the Tibetan exile community of Dharamsala, in northern India — the "forbidden land,” as Dechen jokes.

The Norlha boutique, which features Norlha brand textiles made of yak wool from the region, at Norden Camp, a glamorous camping, or ‘glamping,’ experience available on the Sangke Grasslands of the Tibetan plateau in China July 20, 2016. — Picture by Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times

That is where Dechen’s parents live and where she grew up. There, the family had heard countless grim tales of China’s policies in Tibet, which the Chinese army occupied in 1951. Nevertheless, they decided to try to engage with Tibetans in the Chinese-ruled region and make an attempt at social enterprise here.

"My standpoint is to work with what we’ve got; this is the situation here, and I’m just going to work with what there is,” said Kim Yeshi, Dechen’s mother and a scholar of Tibetan religion originally from the United States. "There are a lot of things you have in hand. If you deal with those, there’s a lot you can do to help improve the people’s livelihoods and preserve their culture.”

In 2004, Dechen, who had just graduated from Connecticut College, came to Amdo for the first time, as an aspiring documentary filmmaker. She returned the next year to travel for seven months with her younger brother, Genam. At her mother’s request, they gathered two tons of yak wool to bring to Nepal to have it woven at a friend’s workshop.

A dinner using local foods, this time including yak meat, is brought to guests at Norden Camp, a glamorous camping, or ‘glamping,’ experience available on the Sangke Grasslands of the Tibetan plateau in China July 20, 2016. — Picture by Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times

In 2006, Yeshi came to help her daughter set up a workshop here. It was the first time she had set foot in Tibet.

"The strangest reaction I had was that you could just drive through and get from one area to another,” she said. "The stories I had heard were that travel to places in this area was one to two days by horse.”

It was July, and Yeshi said some of the grasslands looked "shaved.” She concluded that overgrazing was a problem, and this contributed to her idea of helping to create employment for nomads that would not rely on traditional herding. (The Chinese government also points to overgrazing to justify a policy of forcing nomads into resettlement villages, which many Tibetans criticise.)

Yeshi said she also found that "young people don’t want to become nomads anymore.”

"Children who have been to school can’t imagine the type of life a nomad would have, especially the women,” she added. "It’s change that happens because of the way life evolves, markets evolve.”

A horse rider on a rise near Norden Camp, a glamorous camping, or ‘glamping,’ experience available on the Sangke Grasslands of the Tibetan plateau in China July 20, 2016. — Picture by Gilles Sabrie/The New York Times

They found land for the textile workshop by the village of Zorge Ritoma, which has 200 nomadic households. The Yeshi family members and some locals traveled to Cambodia and Nepal to train in weaving. Machines in the workshop are from Nepal, and Nepalese sometimes come to teach the nomads.

The textile business now has 120 employees, about 110 at the workshop itself.

"Providing jobs in a village, people could continue to live together, and people could stay with their parents and kids,” Dechen said. "They don’t have to leave their hometown for jobs.”

Her mother said the long-term goal is to figure out how to replicate these efforts around the plateau to create a sustainable economy for nomads.

"I think if we can be successful with Norlha, a lot of people will see what’s possible,” Yeshi said. "Other people may try what we’re doing. Maybe if we’re lucky, we can have basic management courses on how to run businesses in a modern way, in an efficient way.” — The New York Times