Do you know what it is like to miss your homeland? And how to overcome the feeling that you cannot walk on the land where you were born? Traveling across many Asian countries, I always observe with interest how the settlers in the 19th and early 20th centuries tried to fight their melancholy. Some people built colonial-style houses, some people hung photographs of their relatives on the walls.

The first Westerners, that time the Portuguese, came to Macau, in the very south of today’s China, in the 16th century. Here the center of Christian proselytism was established, and the famous and adventurous missionary Matteo Ricci started his long way across China to spread His Word. And then several dozen families from Portugal followed them. The legend says that the newcomers were so keen to walk on the native land that they brought with them small paving tiles from their homeland and paved some streets and courtyards in Macau. And they did it so skillfully and carefully that even until now, grass does not break through between the cracks of the tiles. All attempts by the local Chinese to reproduce today this method of paving end in failure, the grass quickly grows through the cracks.

This story was told to me by the former old Portuguese, senior architect of Macau who settled here dozens of years ago.

A perfect example of how to keep your homeland in your heart carefully.