Chinese is famous for their nostalgia.  They gain this special character from their culture and tradition.  Chinese, savoring tradition, are deeply tied to, or at least mentally tie to specific locations.
      Just as Dr. Philip C. Holtrop said China has a land culture.  That is quit true.  Chinese emphasis stability a lot.  They bear special feeling about certain places and keep these places private.  They always have nostalgia lingering in their minds.
      A traditional Chinese home has walls enclose it.  Stepping behind the spirit wall, one is in a courtyard with perhaps a little garden around a corner.  Once inside of a typical traditional Chinese house, one is wrapped in an air of calm beauty, an ordered world of buildings, pavement, rocks, and decorative flowerbed.  But he cannot have a distant view: nowhere does space open out before him.  The only open space is the sky above.  In Chinese belief, if every thing in a garden or courtyard can be taken at one glance, it will be uninteresting.  Chinese is rooted in his place.  Once he settles down, he won’t move for a relatively long time.  Chinese are loyal to the place they live in.  They cherish their living places, thus they want to make the place as full and complex as possible.  Chinese changes their living places only when there are some special serious reasons.
      Chinese have gained this special character from their belief of Confucian and Taoism.  Influenced by Confucian and Taoism, Chinese never had a strong, national wide religion throughout their five-thousand-year civilization.  The gods they respected were their ancestors.  They believed that their ancestors would bless and protect them as long as they enshrined and worship their ancestors and lived at their original place.
      Chinese nostalgia has its historical reasons.  As a country emphasized agriculture a lot in the past thousands of years, the Chinese tie to place is deeply felt.  From this perspective, the notion of the Chinese tie to a special place can be said to be rather antiquated. The Taoist classic Tao Te Ching captures the ideal of rootedness in place with these words: “though there may be another country in the neighborhood so close that they are within sight of each other and the crowing of cocks and barking of dogs in one place can be heard in the other, yet there is no traffic and communication between them; and throughout their lives the two peoples have nothing to do with each other.”  Farmers had ranked high in China in feudalistic society for thousands of years.  The reason is not only that they are engaged in a “root” industry of producing food but that, unlike pecuniary merchants, they are tied to the land and do not abandon their country when it is in danger.  Moreover, to reduce relationship between different groups of people is an easy way to reduce conflicts.  Of course, in modern view this way is rather negative.  All the emperors in Chinese history lay high pressure on commerce, thinking that merchants might make the society unsteady and they produce no real products to the society.  
      The literatures of ancient China also help to form the Chinese tie of homeland.  Nostalgia is a recurrent theme in Chinese poetry.  A foreign reader of translated Chinese poems may well be taken aback and even put off by the frequency of the lament for home.  An ancient Chinese poem reads thus:”  The waves flow past and yearn the bygone shores; the moving clouds long for the native land."  But this is not entirely something contrived by poets for their amusement or much ado about nothing.  From this people can discover a philosophical truth in Chinese conception.  It is only when the waves have flowed past the shores that they begin to miss and pine for them.  It is only when the clouds have moved far away from home that they miss the native land.  If the waters were stagnant, such emotions will not arise.  Another example is the poet that almost every Chinese known:” Lifting my head, I see the radiant moon; I bow my head and think of home."  There is an implication here that to Chinese native land is like the moon: that which one can see, but one cannot reach.
      Chinese love their homeland much, but that doesn’t mean Chinese never leave their home to establish their career.  Home is the softest place in the heart of every Chinese.  A Chinese may miss his home, his original place constantly, but be back his birthplace only when he is dying.  Li bai is the most famous poet in Chinese history.  He had written countless poems about the deep feeling of nostalgia.  But during his life time, though he had passed by his hometown many times, he had never been back home to see what the land he dreamed from time to time was really like.  Being like most of Chinese, he would rather leave his homeland in mind.
      Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, feel-good seductive but also potentially dangerous, and something to be particularly wary of at a conservative, self-satisfied moment in Chinese art and culture.  In the modern society, it is difficult to say where really is native land.  The Chinese feeling of nostalgia seems to ebb away a little, but most of Chinese still have this special feeling in deep of their heart.