Nostalgia is vital in fostering emotional connections between tourists and places by symbolizing and consolidating individuals’ collective memory. This paper considers 60 historical and cultural districts from the China Central Television documentary series Nostalgia in Mind to investigate nostalgia. We specifically introduce place narratives and analyze the dimensions and connotations of nostalgia culture. Our empirical results reveal four dimensions associated with nostalgia, namely time, space, memory, and emotion. In addition, we explore various factors affecting nostalgia (e.g., nostalgia subjects, nostalgia carriers, nostalgia touchpoints, and nostalgia emotions), which further shape historical and cultural districts’ nostalgia culture. To better understand this type of culture, we build a theoretical framework along the dimensions of instrumental-expressive and concrete-abstract. This framework contributes to a richer understanding of the nature and impact of nostalgia and serves as a reference for tourism destination marketing and management of historical and cultural districts in an urbanization context.