How to Find Your Family’s Qiaopi Letters: A Hands-On Guide to Wuyi Remittance Archives

Between roughly 1850 and 1950, millions of men from the Siyi (四邑) and Wuyi (五邑) counties of Guangdong left for the gold fields, railroads, laundries, and kitchens of North America, Australia, and Southeast Asia — and many of them wrote home. The letters they sent, folding a family message and a remittance into a single document, survive today as one of the most personal archives in the world: the qiaopi (侨批), called yinxin (银信, “silver letter”) in the Wuyi region. In 2013, UNESCO inscribed the collection — formally the Qiaopi and Yinxin Correspondence and Remittance Documents — into its Memory of the World register, a recognition of roughly 160,000 surviving letters, by one government accounting, concentrated in Guangdong and Fujian. It was cited at the time as Guangdong’s first World Memory heritage item.

This is not a guide about what those letters reveal — the Reading Qiaopi article does that, letter by letter — and it is not a primer on what qiaopi is. This is a guide to the question underneath both: how do you find your own family’s letters, and read them once you do?

If your people came from Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping, or Heshan, there is a real chance that somewhere — in an archive in Shantou, a museum in Jiangmen, or a hall by the river in Taishan — a letter written by someone who shares your surname is waiting to be found. Not everyone’s letters survived, and not every family that did write will be findable. But many are, and here is the path to finding out which case is yours.

The path in five steps:

1. Gather your coordinates — the village name, the surname (in Chinese characters if you can), the destination, and the era.
2. Match them to an archive — Jiangmen for Wuyi families, Shantou for Chaoshan, Taishan’s Haikou Port for Taishan lineages.
3. Contact the archive directly with a short, specific inquiry.
4. Ask for a photograph or copy — availability varies, so be patient and follow up.
5. Read it — separate the letter from the remittance, find the amount in the 苏码 numerals, and locate your family inside it.

What you’re looking for

A qiaopi is a fused document — a letter and a remittance in one. The same sheet (or the same envelope packet) carries the family news and the record of money sent, the amount sometimes written in 苏码 (Suzhou numerals), a commercial shorthand that looks like nothing in a modern checkbook. Understanding this matters for your search, because the two halves of the document were often handled by two different hands: the family wrote the letter, and a remittance agency — a 银号 (silver house) or 侨批局 (qiaopi bureau) — recorded and moved the money. Each half can carry clues about where to look next.

Physically, the documents are compact and practical. A letter might be written on thin paper, folded into an envelope printed with the bureau’s name and route, and stamped with the agency’s seal. The remittance record — the amount, the sender’s and recipient’s names, the date of receipt — was often a separate slip or a column alongside the letter. When you see a qiaopi in an archive display, you are looking at a small, worn, intensely personal object: creased from folding, handled by a courier and then by the person who read it aloud at home.

One terminology note before you start. The Wuyi region’s own word for these documents is 银信 (yinxin), while neighboring Chaoshan calls them 侨批 (qiaopi). The 2013 UNESCO inscription covers both under a single title. In practice this means you should search both terms — a Taishan letter may be catalogued as 银信, a Shantou-held letter as 侨批. The two words name the same kind of document and the same kind of family.

One more piece of context will make the archives make sense: how a letter physically got home. Before the modern postal system, a qiaopi traveled through a chain of human and institutional carriers. A 水客 (shuike, “water courier”) — often a returning migrant or a trusted traveler — carried letters and cash back by hand, walking them through the village lanes. As volume grew, dedicated agencies took over: the 银号 (silver houses) and 侨批局 (qiaopi bureaus) that recorded the remittance, printed the envelopes, and moved the money, and eventually the state postal system absorbed much of the traffic. Each link in that chain left marks — a courier’s route, a bureau’s seal, a postmark — and those marks are exactly what an archive uses to catalogue a letter today. The delivery chain is also why the region matters: letters bound for Taishan were often handled by different bureaus than letters bound for Chaoshan, which is why the archives are organized the way they are.

Where the letters are held

The surviving letters are not scattered randomly; they cluster in a handful of institutions, and knowing which one matches your family saves weeks.

Shantou (汕头) — the largest posted-letter collection. The 汕头市档案馆侨批分馆 (Shantou Municipal Archives, Qiaopi Branch), the institution that grew out of the former 侨批文物馆 (Qiaopi Heritage Hall), holds what government sources describe as more than 80,000 original letters — reported as the largest collection of actually-posted qiaopi in China. This is the first place to look for families from the Chaoshan region, but its reach is broader: as a national collection it drew donations from many lineages, and its cataloguing has been substantial — the archive reports repairing some 30,000 damaged letters and cataloguing tens of thousands more.

Jiangmen (江门) — the Wuyi core. The 中国侨都华侨华人博物馆 (China Qiaodu Overseas Chinese Museum), also known as the 五邑华侨华人博物馆 (Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum), holds more than 40,000 overseas-Chinese artifacts, including, by one account, more than 20,000 qiaopi. If your family is from Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping, or Heshan — the five counties the museum is named for — this is very likely your archive. The museum is a national first-class museum, and its qiaopi sit alongside the overseas-Chinese passports, remittance ledgers, and the 1909 first issue of the Xinning Magazine (新宁杂志), the earliest qiaoxiang periodical.

Taishan (台山) — the river port where the letters flowed. The 台山银信博物馆 (Taishan Silver Letter Museum) stands at 海口埠 (Haikou Port) in Duanfen (端芬镇), the port Taishan sources call the “first port for Cantonese emigration” (出洋第一港). The museum holds more than a thousand silver letters and displays a silver-letter wall of over 2,000 more; outside, twenty pillars carry 648 fired ceramic tiles reproducing silver letters, a walkable index of the county’s correspondence. If your family sailed from Taishan, this is the archive to visit in person.

The Guangdong Provincial Archives (广东省档案馆) also holds qiaopi material, and — worth remembering — letters survive outside museums too. Ancestral halls and clan associations, where 祠堂 (ancestral halls) sometimes kept family correspondence alongside clan records and genealogies, are a second, less-catalogued place letters can surface. If you are able to visit in person, most of these institutions are open to the public (the Jiangmen museum, for example, is free and open during the day Tuesday through Sunday), and a visit is worth it even before any written inquiry: curatorial and archival staff can often tell you on the spot whether a surname or village appears in the collection, and seeing the letters displayed gives you a feel for the document you are looking for.

Start with what you know

Before you write to any archive, assemble four facts. They are the coordinates of your search, and even two of them will help.

1. The village name. Qiaopi are addressed to a village, not just a surname. Many letters name the home village and the 祖屋 (ancestral house). If you don’t know yours, ask the oldest person in your family — a village name, even a village name remembered imperfectly, is the single most useful thing you can bring. The Taishan villages guide here can help you reconstruct the geography.

2. The surname — and its local rendering. A surname alone is broad, but a surname plus a village is nearly an address. Render the name in Chinese characters if you can, because archives catalogue by characters, and the same romanization can stand for several different surnames.

3. The destination. Where your ancestor went matters, because it determines which remittance agencies — and therefore which archives — handled the money. Letters from North America mostly flowed through different corridors than letters from Southeast Asia; the Singapore remittance route tells one side of that story, and the broader migration history of Wuyi’s ports maps the corridors themselves.

4. The era. A rough date — exclusion era, Republic, wartime — tells you which archive and which agency records to ask for. The immigration records your family may already be searching can help here: the Canadian immigration records guide explains how to date an ancestor’s arrival, and the Head Tax article covers one of the records a Wuyi migrant often left behind. As a shorthand, scholars periodize Wuyi emigration into four broad stretches — an early phase before the Opium Wars, the surge of the mid-1800s, the peak between the Opium War and the 1911 Revolution, and the Republic years through the Second World War. Placing your ancestor in one of these four is often enough to know which archive’s holdings to request.

Gather what you can, and don’t wait for all four. A village and a surname are enough to begin.

Which archive for which family

With those facts in hand, here is the rough matching. It is a guide, not a guarantee — records are incomplete, names were rendered inconsistently, and many letters simply did not survive.

• Wuyi families (Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping, Heshan): start with the Jiangmen Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum, then the Taishan Silver Letter Museum if the family is Taishan-specific.
• Chaoshan families: start with the Shantou Qiaopi Branch archives.
• Any family unsure of region: query both, and the Guangdong Provincial Archives.

If your ancestor’s records point to a specific remittance agency or 银号, mention it — the agency’s seals and stamps, where they survive, are themselves searchable identifiers. Taishan’s museum has displayed hundreds of silver-agency seals, and matching a seal can help trace a letter’s route even when the letter itself is gone.

Asking for a copy

This is the step people find most intimidating, and the most important to get right. There is no single national online form. The practical path is direct contact: email or write to the archive with the village name, the surname (in Chinese characters if you have them), the destination, and any agency or era you know.

A useful inquiry is short and specific. Something like: “I am a descendant of the [surname] family of [village] in [county]. My family emigrated to [destination] around [era]. Do you hold qiaopi addressed to this village, and is it possible to request a photograph of any letter matching this surname?” Include everything you know, but keep the ask simple — archives respond best to one clear question.

Be prepared for a range of answers. Archives vary in what they can retrieve — by cataloguing status, by the condition of the letters (many are damaged), by access and rights, and by staff capacity. Some descendants report success requesting photographs of a specific letter; others find the archive can confirm a surname exists in the collection but cannot immediately locate a specific letter. There is no uniform public request form, and no guarantee of a copy; availability depends on the archive, the catalogue, and the condition of the document. Patience and specificity help, and a follow-up a few weeks later is reasonable.

The reverse flow — donation — is well established and warmly received. Archives including Shantou’s hold public donation ceremonies, and private collectors have built substantial portions of the national collection by giving family letters back. If your own family still holds letters, the archive is the right home for them — and the letters you give become searchable for other descendants of your village.

Digitization is underway — but slowly

A hopeful note with a caution. Archives are digitizing and repairing qiaopi — Shantou alone reports repairing some 30,000 damaged letters and cataloguing over 40,000 more — and digital platforms are beginning to appear. But there is, as of now, no single public portal where you can type a surname and read the full text of every surviving letter. Treat online access as a developing resource: some initiatives may let you browse, inquire, or donate remotely, but availability varies archive by archive and should be confirmed directly. For the moment, direct inquiry remains the most reliable path.

How to read one once you hold it

You have the image or the photocopy in your hands. Now what?

Separate the two halves. Find the family letter (the message) and the remittance record (the amounts, the agency, the stamps). They may be on the same sheet or split across an envelope and a slip.

Look for the money. Amounts are often written in 苏码 (Suzhou numerals), a shorthand used in commerce that many readers mistake for decoration. They are learnable in an afternoon, and they tell you the sender’s prosperity and the family’s dependence — a single remittance can represent a season of a father’s wages on the railroad or in a laundry.

Read the stock phrases. Many qiaopi repeat recognizable formulas — greetings, apologies for sending too little, filial reminders, promises to return. Learning a handful turns a wall of unfamiliar characters into a letter you can feel. Not every letter uses them, and not every letter is legible, but the common ones are common for a reason: they were the safe, expected things to say across an ocean. A typical letter might open with a greeting to the household, then move to the amount enclosed (“I send you X dollars by way of such-and-such bureau”), then apologize for the smallness of the sum, then turn to the family: who is well, who needs schooling money, when the sender hopes to return. Once you recognize the pattern, you can find the news inside it.

Find the people. Note the sender, the recipient, and the relatives named in passing — a mother, a brother, a child’s schooling, a debt to a neighbor. Many letters name the village and the recipient, though damage, missing envelopes, abbreviations, and dialectal place names can all interfere.

Place it in time. Exclusion era, wartime, the years after — once you know roughly when it was written, the letter’s silences become as meaningful as its words. A letter that stops coming is its own document, and what the letters stopped saying is part of the story too.

If you want a guided, letter-by-letter reading, the Reading Qiaopi article walks through several with full translations.

Finding the descendants — and being found

Here is the part that closes the loop. Beginning around 2017, Guangdong launched initiatives with a poignant name — 寻访侨批银信后人, “seeking the descendants of the qiaopi” — to reunite letters with the families they were written to. Taishan has run its own “find the silver-letter descendants” drive. These are documented programs, and they accepted submissions through government channels and public accounts; their current intake should be confirmed with the institution directly.

The meaning for you is twofold. First, your family’s letters may already have been flagged by one of these programs, awaiting a descendant who asks. Second, you can participate — by submitting your village and surname, you make it easier for the archive to connect a letter to your family. The search runs both ways.

When you reach out, prepare the same coordinates you would for an archive inquiry: the village, the surname in Chinese characters, the destination, and any family story that might help match a letter — a remembered house, a relative who emigrated in a particular year, an occupation, a nickname. These are the details that let staff connect an anonymous letter in a drawer to your family. The descendant-search work is slow and manual, and it depends on families making themselves findable in return. If you do nothing else, leave your village and surname with the archive so that when a letter matching your family is catalogued, it has somewhere to go.

What a letter gives you

Strip away the procedure and the archives, and what remains is this: a qiaopi is proof. It is evidence that a specific man or woman left a specific village, worked somewhere hard, and did not forget. The letters were written into a world the social historians call the 两头家 (liangtoujia) — the “two-family” arrangement, a household split between a husband abroad and a wife at home, the woman remembered in the village as a 金山婆 (jinshanpo), a “Gold Mountain wife” who managed the household, raised the children, and read these letters aloud. The Jinshanpo story tells what those women did with the money and the silence between letters, and the Women of Wuyi cluster gathers the rest of that half of the history.

When you find your family’s qiaopi, you are holding the document that connected the two halves of the family — the remittance that helped build a diaolou tower (碉楼) back home, the words that told a wife she was not forgotten. The roughly 160,000 letters that survive are, taken together, a shared record of Wuyi families’ leaving and staying. Yours may be among them. It is worth the asking.

Start with your village and your surname. Write to the archive. And if you already hold letters in your family — consider giving them a home where other descendants can find them.

Sources

• 国家档案局 — 2013 侨批档案·海外华侨银信（世界记忆名录）
• 梅州市政府 — 侨批银信：人类的集体记忆遗产（约16万件存量）
• 广东省侨办 — 汕头市档案馆侨批抢救修复及数字化
• 广东省政府 — 汕头侨批分馆：馆藏侨批逾8万件
• 台山市政府 — 海口埠银信博物馆与银信柱
• 江门市政府 — 国家一级博物馆（侨博馆，含五邑银信）
• 新华网 — 寻访侨批银信后人

Continue Reading

• What Is Qiaopi? A Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Remittance Letters
• Reading Qiaopi: What Remittance Letters Reveal About Wuyi Families
• Inside the Taishan Overseas Chinese Museum
• The Women Who Built Gold Mountain: Jinshanpo Wives