Hit film revives overseas Chinese remittance letters

"It is a beautiful film," said Qi Wenjing, a teacher in Beijing who recently watched it. "The language in those letters, the Chinese calligraphy, the texture of the yellowed paper, all of it carried such deep longing across thousands of miles."

The filmmakers say those emotions were drawn not from imagination, but from real qiaopi archives preserved across South China.

"I realized how many heartbreaking stories passed through those remittance agencies every day," said actress Li Sitong, who plays the lead role of Xie Nanzhi in the film. "Compared with the movie, the real letters are even more moving."

In South China's Guangdong province, the Chaoshan region is known for its distinctive cuisine, teahouse culture, and deep ties to overseas Chinese communities.

For generations, people from Chaoshan left for Southeast Asia and beyond, fleeing war, poverty, and natural disasters in search of better fortunes. Between 1864 and 1911, nearly 3 million people departed the region, according to local customs records.

In one of the film's most painful threads, Zheng Musheng spends his life doing grueling labor abroad — mining, pedaling tricycles, and working aboard cargo ships — while sending nearly everything he earns back home.

His fate mirrors that of earlier generations of overseas Chinese who spent decades abroad, living frugally so that their families back home could survive. In the late 19th century, many living far from banks or post offices relied on fellow villagers traveling between Southeast Asia and China to carry their letters and money home.

The qiaopi they sent contained tender reminders to care for aging parents, worries over children's education, and words of longing between husbands and wives separated by oceans.

But these letters carried something larger as well. During the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45), overseas Chinese used qiaopi networks to send donations back to support the homeland.

"In this way, qiaopi are not cold historical documents," said Li Yihang with the Guangdong Federation of Social Sciences. "They are living heritage carrying longing, trust, and devotion to family and nation."

In 1979, qiaopi services were placed under the unified management of the Bank of China. UNESCO added the qiaopi archives to its Memory of the World Register in 2013.