In an icy, windswept corner of northern Europe, remote farming communities are puzzling over the appearance of the most unlikely of visitors - a Chinese tycoon offering millions of dollars to buy up a vast chunk of wilderness and build an eco-tourism resort and golf course.
With its volcanic rock and mercilessly short summers, the plan by former Communist Party official Huang Nubo to turn a 300-square kilometre stretch of barren, snow-blasted land in northeast Iceland into a tourist resort seems foolhardy and eccentric at best.
After all, can he really expect up to 10,000 guests a year to make a 21/2-hour journey by small plane from Reykjavik to northern Iceland, which is followed by a drive over rugged roads to visit Grimsstadir a Fjollum - a destination that can, not unfairly, be described as forbidding and desolate?
Huang's plan - described by one ecologist as 'lacking all sense and logic' - involves paying nearly US$9 million for the land and investing more than US$150 million more to develop a hotel and resort with attractions including horse riding and hot air balloon rides.
In a country desperate for foreign investment after being left cruelly exposed by the 2008 financial crisis, Huang might have felt justified in expecting his bizarre but lavish proposal to be viewed as a welcome ray of sunshine in glum economic times.
Instead, the response to the idea of a Chinese multimillionaire buying up what amounts to 0.3 per cent of Iceland has been decidedly chilly in parts of Reykjavik, where suspicions are rife that the project is in fact a cover for Chinese strategic development.
Some politicians, pointing to a series of unlikely recent investments in Iceland by China, believe it may be part of a bigger move by Beijing to get access to trans-Arctic shipping lanes that could soon open as polar ice caps melt.