“Dear You”: How Qiaopi Connected the Shared Memories of China and Southeast Asia

Author：Lim Kah Hao, Director of the Malaysian Chinese Museum

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A Teochew-language film, Dear You — literally "A Love Letter to Grandma" — has recently struck a chord with audiences across Chinese communities. The "love letters" that recur throughout the film are, in fact, qiaopi.

For many, the word "qiaopi" will be new. But for the coastal regions of southern China — especially Fujian and Guangdong — and for Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, qiaopi were once the thread that held families together across oceans and mountains.

In the Teochew and Hokkien dialects, "pi" (批) simply means "letter." So qiaopi literally refers to letters sent home by overseas Chinese. The crucial difference from ordinary correspondence is that each qiaopi carried not just words but also money: it was simultaneously a family letter and a remittance — which is why the documents are also known as yinxin ("money letters").

During the great waves of Chinese emigration in the modern era, countless laborers, merchants and migrants crossed the seas to seek a living in the Nanyang — Southeast Asia — the Americas and beyond. Living frugally abroad, they sent their hard-earned savings home to support aging parents and raise their children. For many families left behind, the arrival of a qiaopi meant that the household bills could be paid — and, just as importantly, that a loved one far away was safe and sound.

Qiaopi, in short, carried not only money but also affection, responsibility and longing.

Their rise is inseparable from the modern history of Chinese emigration. Scholars generally trace the origins of qiaopi to the Ming dynasty, though the maritime prohibition policies of the Ming and Qing left few written records. It was only after the mid-19th century — as ports opened and Chinese workers emigrated in large numbers — that the qiaopi trade truly took off.

In the early days, with international postal and banking networks still in their infancy, overseas Chinese had little choice but to entrust their letters and money to fellow townsmen, sailors or merchants shuttling between Southeast Asia and China. These itinerant couriers were known as shuike — literally, "water guests."

As emigration swelled and demand for remittances grew, dedicated qiaopi agencies — qiaopi ju — sprang up across Southeast Asia and along China's southeastern coast. The Tianyi Letter Bureau (Tianyi Xinju), founded in 1880 by Guo Youpin, an overseas Chinese based in the Philippines, is widely regarded as one of the earliest qiaopi institutions.

These agencies went by different names in different places: minxin ju or pi ju in southern Fujian, pi guan in the Chaozhou region, huidui ju in the Cantonese-speaking region, and hui zhuang or huidui ju in Malaysia.

Qiaopi were more than a financial and communications system; they formed a distinctive cultural network rooted in everyday life. Overseas Chinese of the time remitted money in roughly three ways.

The first was letter remittance (xinhui), the quintessential qiaopi form: the sender handed the letter and cash to a qiaopi agency, and a courier — the pi jiao — delivered both to the recipient's doorstep.

The second was draft remittance (piaohui): the sender bought a money order, mailed it home, and relatives cashed it at an exchange.

The third was telegraphic transfer (dianhui) — the fastest but most expensive method, reserved for extraordinary times. During the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937–1945), for example, many overseas Chinese used telegraphic transfers to get funds to China as quickly as possible.

After World War II, as Southeast Asian nations gained independence and the Cold War set in, some countries began restricting remittances to China. In response, overseas Chinese developed what became known as "hidden qiaopi" (anpi): senders could no longer state amounts openly, so they resorted to coded phrases such as "so many jin of rice" or "so many jin of charcoal" (a jin being roughly half a kilogram). These coded expressions have since become a telling record of overseas Chinese life under the Cold War.

In a sense, qiaopi document the real lives of ordinary Chinese emigrants. Unlike the notebooks of literati or official archives, their contents are mostly plain — a report that all is well, family news, questions about the harvest, exhortations to the children to study hard. And it is precisely this ordinariness that makes them the most authentic record we have of the emotional world and daily lives of ordinary overseas Chinese.

Many early emigrants had little formal schooling and dictated their letters to professional scribes. The letters are short, yet every line rings true.

Today, as we look back at these yellowed letters, we see not only individual destinies but the entire arc of the Chinese diaspora.

That is why, in 2013, the "Qiaopi and Yinxin: Correspondence and Remittance Documents from Overseas Chinese" collection was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register — documentary heritage that all of humanity now shares the duty to preserve.

The late scholar Jao Tsung-I once called qiaopi "the Dunhuang of overseas Chinese history." The metaphor is apt. Having preserved a vast trove of overseas Chinese memory — scattered across private homes, spanning national borders and enduring for more than a century — qiaopi are no less important to the study of Chinese emigration than the Dunhuang manuscripts are to the study of Chinese history.

In recent years, as films such as Dear You have spread, qiaopi have re-entered the public eye, drawing renewed attention from museums, overseas Chinese cultural institutions and heritage organizations across China and Southeast Asia.

At the Malaysian Chinese Museum, we too hold a substantial collection of original qiaopi and have curated special exhibitions around them. Since the film's release, a growing number of young visitors have been taking the initiative to learn about the history of Chinese emigration, Nanyang culture and dialect traditions.

What this shows is that cultural heritage can remain alive only when it genuinely enters contemporary society.

I believe the film's success also offers an important lesson for heritage communication: museums, filmmakers and the media can — and should — build far deeper partnerships.

Qiaopi are not merely objects of historical research. They are a vital bridge linking the shared memories of China and Southeast Asia.

Over the centuries, trade, migration, language, religion and cultural exchange have forged deep bonds between China and Southeast Asia. Qiaopi are among the most genuine and most concrete historical testimonies to that transregional interaction of civilizations.

Today, as China and ASEAN deepen people-to-people exchanges, we have all the more reason to revisit these memories that crossed seas and mountains.

Preserving qiaopi is not only about protecting the past. It is about protecting cultural diversity — and the history of genuine, equal exchanges between civilizations.

In the future, I hope museums, research institutions and cultural practitioners across China and ASEAN will work together more closely, so that more young people — through qiaopi, dialects, cinema and Nanyang culture — can come to understand the history and emotional ties they share.

Because these hundred-year-old letters were never written to a hometown alone. They were written for the future, too.

(If you have specific expertise, or would like to share your thoughts, please send us your writings at CAobservation@outlook.com)