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.…
A guide to reading qiaopi — the remittance letters that sustained Wuyi families for a century. Five representative letters with full translations and analysis, revealing the formula, the feeling, and the family dynamics encoded in every silver letter.
In the mid-1800s, a young man from Taishan, Guangdong, stood on the deck of a ship bound for Havana, Cuba. He wasn’t alone—thousands of others from his hometown had made the same journey, carrying little more than hope and a fierce determination to survive. Back home, poverty and social unrest had left few options. For…