One day, walking along the central embankment of Xiamen, my friend and I found a museum room open even at night in the old building of the Huaqiao Bank of Chinese Emigrants. The guard proudly informed us that this was the Qiaopi Museum, “because everything here used to be based on them.” It turned out that qiaopi is a whole culture of correspondence and a network for currency transfers that has united Chinese people around the world for almost a century. What is so special about these letters, how are they similar to modern wichat exchangers and why are they protected by UNESCO?
The money transfer letters that Chinese emigrants Huaqiao sent to their relatives in China were widely popular in the 19th and early 20th century. As today, when leaving their native lands, people were looking for options to keep in touch with relatives and friends, as well as to help them financially. However, in those years, institutions engaged in postal transfers in Southeast Asia and other countries were not sufficiently developed, so funds and information were delivered to their homeland through a network of intermediaries who helped transport something by sea – shuike (水客).
Qiaopi (侨批, qiáopī) is a special type of correspondence that combines the letter itself and information about the money transfer. The name comes from the second part of the word Huaqiao, that is, Chinese living abroad, as well as the word “letter” xin, but in the Chaoshan dialect (潮汕话) – pi (批). You can also find references to qiaopi as fanpi (番批, “foreign letters”) and yinxin (银信, “notification of money transfer”). Most of the Qiaopi emigrant letters have been preserved in the provinces of Guangdong, Hainan and Fujian, and the cities of Xiamen and Chaoshan have become centers of research on the Qiaopi culture in China.
Qiaopi’s letters were an important tool for intra-family communication. Sometimes Chinese emigrants of Huaqiao for 40-50 years corresponded with relatives and children who had never been seen, thereby preserving the connection of generations. Usually in letters they gave orders about property and discussed important family events. Often the correspondence took the format of a collective, for example, one branch of the family in Thailand exchanged news with another branch of the family in Fujian province.
At first, merchants and sailors were engaged in forwarding special letters, but then, with the growing demand for such services, private offices — the Qiaopi bureau (侨批局) took up the case. Over time, thanks to the excellent reputation of Huaqiao, some such bureaus in different regions of the world practically monopolized the business of sending letters and money transfers by Chinese abroad. According to statistics, 180 Qiaopi bureaus and 700 of their branches at home and abroad were registered throughout China in 1930. On the eve of the formation of the PRC in 1948, there were a total of more than a thousand branches of the network of such offices, which continued to operate until the 70s of the last century.
The currency transfer went in one direction – from abroad to China. In the local offices of the Qiaopi bureau, all possible customer data was recorded in detail and assigned special numbers to them, as well as copies of the data were sent to the appropriate branch abroad. Therefore, even if the letter simply stated “mother”, the addressee was easily identified. In addition, the bureau’s employees knew regular customers well and sometimes even wrote response letters instead of them. To avoid forgery, standard forms were used for money transfers, but the transfer amount could be any.
A relative who earned money in a foreign country gave cash at the nearest branch of the Qiaopi bureau, and relatives received a special form with a seal brought by sea in their department, which was cashed out immediately upon receipt. The recipient could send a free letter confirming receipt of funds in China and supplement it with family news. If the recipient refused to send a reply letter, then the bureau staff did it for him.
In Chaoshan in 1994, as part of the study of the phenomenon of qiaopi, a special database of such letters was opened. In the shortest possible time, it was possible to collect more than 116 thousand letters-translations from hundreds of countries, and private collectors of Qiaopi also contributed to the search. More than 60 thousand scanned copies of these letters were sent for further study to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Indonesia.
In 2013, UNESCO included the Qiaopi letters in the “Memory of the World” program as a world documentary and cultural heritage. Huaqiao and their families have witnessed the history of the development of China and other countries, so the study of Qiaopi translation letters and databases of the Qiaopi bureau attracts scientists and activists who are engaged in the study of cultural and historical realities of those years.