Starting around the middle of the 19th century, a Chinese diaspora grew as tens of thousands emigrated from Guangdong villages to many places around the world. They saved some of their earnings to send back to their parents and if married, to their wives and any children back in China.
Qiaopi is one of several names given to the “silver letters” Chinese emigrants sent home. These remittances of money were typically accompanied by brief letters that described how the funds were to be distributed as well as personal expressions to family. Letters sent back to the emigrants were called huipi.
Access to these correspondences accompanying the remittances could provide valuable insights about relationships between the emigrants and their families. A detailed examination of a collection of these letters, which have not been studied in depth previously, estimated to number over 160,000 in private collections, has been analyzed in a 2018 book by Gregor Benton and Haiming Liu in Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820 -1980.
Using archival data collated from different parts of the world, the authors analyze the institutions for receiving and delivering the remittances and letters as well as delivering the huipi to the emigrant emitters. Since many families of emigrants were illiterate, they had to rely on the couriers (pijiao) to prepare the huipi or letters to send to the remitter to not only acknowledge receipt of funds but ask for more money, beg the emigrant to return, or seek guidance to help them emigrate to join them in America, among many other topics of family matters.
Unlike in today's world of instantaneously delivered communications with secured access, it must be recognized that in the not too distant past, the process was much slower and possibly subject to fraud. (As a child, I wondered how swiftly and safely were my father's remittances to a small village in Hoiping.)
The qiaopi trade involved several major components ranging from the couriers (shuike), remittance shops or "clearing houses (piju), and the Chinese banking system. There were differences in the details of the operation in different regions as well as in other Asian countries but to succeed they all involved a deeply embedded trust between the piju, the remitter, and the recipient. Modifications to the process occurred over time in response to factors as varied as political and social class changes in Chinese society, changing literacy rates, and resistance to nationalization.
The benefits of the remittances went far beyond the individual recipients, according to Benton and Lui, who argue that qiaopi not only connected Chinese emigrants with their families back home but significantly contributed to China’s substantial economic and transnational development.
Due to the rapid growth of Chinese immigration and their remittances, the qiaopi trade quickly grew from one-man operations to the formation of larger piju, a sustainable industry that connected China's modern banks and post office with national, transnational, and international trade networks.
For many years the qiaopi trade was obscure but in the 1990s with the finding of archives of thousands of qiaopi a new research area has been created that looks at emigrants, their descendants, and dependents to describe routines of their daily lives.
Qiaopi had a profound impact on developing China's national economy especially in the coastal regions of Guangdong and Fujian. Chinese migrants throughout the world utilized networks that were uninterrupted for long periods of time linking Chinese throughout the world with their hometown villages.
Some examples of the correspondences in qiaopi and huipi.
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