Rather than accepting an invitation to dine in the City of London with China’s President Xi Jinping, Nicola Surgeon will be on the Sleat Peninsula today.

She will officially open Ionad Iain Nobail (the Iain Noble Centre) at Skye’s Gaelic College, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (SMO), as well as deliver its prestigious annual lecture.

In performing the latter she will follow in the footsteps of the likes of former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, Gordon Brown when Chancellor and last year Rita Izsak, the UN special rapporteur on minority issues.

The First Minister’s other function, is to do with the centre built to house staff from the college and provide teaching and research facilities as well as business premises.

It is named after the late Sir Iain Noble, former merchant banker and Gaelic enthusiast. When he arrived to live on Skye in 1972, he embarked on a fundraising campaign to convert a farm steading on land he had bought. He wanted to build "the first Gaelic establishment of further education in Scotland since the Vikings burned down Columba's abbey on Iona".

Virtually the first person he wrote to was the chairman of a distilling company, one of his bank’s customers.

Sir Iain was fond of recalling that this captain of the whisky industry had declined the request for financial help as his board believed no advantage would come to the people of Skye from a project resuscitating Gaelic.

What did he know? For decades now SMO has been the major economic driver in the south of Skye.

Part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, it provides around 83 full-time jobs and more than 100 part-time posts. It pours around £3 million into the local economy and is estimated to create a demand for around 25,000 beds in local bed and breakfasts and hotels every year.

It has more than 220 higher education students, and a planned rise of 250 over the next three years. Meanwhile, there are more than 1,100 students on part-time, distance learning and short courses with over 200 coming from abroad.

Ionad Iain Nobail is the first building in a long-term project, a settlement complete with shops, conference centre, sports facilities and, crucially, around 100 homes of mixed tenure for the people of Skye. This is Kilbeg, the first new "planned village" on Skye in a century: a community on its doorstep that will sustain SMO’s work as a national centre for Gaelic language and culture.

That work ranges from Gaelic broadcasting and media studies to business management and economic development and information technology to music and literature.

Today Ms Sturgeon will find a modern hi-tech campus whose real contribution to modern Scotland has never really been fully recognised.

It looks across the Sound of Sleat, to the cleared lands of Knoydart where, almost 150 yeard ago, 500 people were evicted.

The vision of Sabhal Mòr Ostaig says something important about our past as well as our future, in any language.