A century before Swift and blockchain emerged, the Chinese had already built their own cross-border financial network.
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
A century before Swift and blockchain emerged, the Chinese had already built their own cross-border financial network.
Trust is more important than life itself.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Xiao Bing, TechFlow
Recently, A Love Letter to Grandma has been trending everywhere. With a 9.1 rating on Douban—the highest score for any Chinese film released since 2000—it emerged as an unexpected box-office hit during the May Day holiday and has already surpassed RMB 200 million in revenue, continuing to generate momentum.
The film centers on a letter delayed by half a century. In the 1940s, men from Chaoshan migrated south to Southeast Asia in search of livelihoods, leaving behind young wives and three children. They died abroad, and out of gratitude, the daughter of their boarding-house owner impersonated them for 18 years—writing letters and sending money home to their wives.
In the film, those crumpled pieces of paper are called “pi” in the Chaoshan dialect. When overseas Chinese sent both letters and money back home, the combined package was known as “qiaopi”—“overseas Chinese remittance letters.” It sounds rustic—but anyone familiar with financial history will instantly recognize:
This was one of humanity’s most extraordinary cross-border financial networks. It predates SWIFT by a century and blockchain by 150 years. Fully private, peer-to-peer, without central clearing or sovereign oversight, it sustained half of modern China’s balance of payments.
Its entire credit foundation rested on a single Chaoshan phrase: “Trust outweighs life itself.”
A Forgotten Financial Infrastructure
Consider just a few figures—and you’ll grasp how formidable this system once was.
The origins of qiaopi trace back to the mid-19th century. The earliest surviving physical example dates to 1881, though operations likely began even earlier. The practice continued uninterrupted until 1979, when the business was formally absorbed into the Bank of China system—operating continuously for over a century.
Approximately 170,000 archival documents remain today: 160,000 in Guangdong Province (more than 100,000 from Chaoshan alone), and around 10,000 in Fujian Province. These are merely the survivors. At its peak, annual inflows through the qiaopi channel reached hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars. During the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937–1945), remittances via qiaopi accounted for over 50% of China’s foreign exchange income—truly half the nation’s external financial lifeline.
Tan Kah Kee personally financed his hometown through qiaopi: in 1913 he founded Jimei School, and in 1921, Xiamen University. A complete modern university was built—one crumpled letter at a time.
Even more astonishing is its operational mechanism.
For most of its existence prior to 1979, this network functioned almost entirely without government endorsement, central banks, or official clearing systems. No SWIFT, no central bank foreign-exchange management, no cross-border interbank accounts—nothing.
So what held it together? Three things: water carriers (“shuikè”), remittance bureaus (“pijú”), and something called “trust”—the very thing today’s finance industry lacks most, yet values most dearly.
Water Carriers: Human-Led, On-Chain Nodes
In the earliest days, there were no bureaus—only water carriers.
A water carrier was a professional who traveled repeatedly between Southeast Asia (“Nanyang”) and Chaoshan or southern Fujian aboard red-hulled ships. They visited mines, rubber plantations, and docks across Nanyang, knocking door-to-door among fellow townspeople to collect letters and money—then literally strapped the cash to their waists. Upon returning to China, they delivered funds and letters house-by-house.
Sounds primitive? Yet this system possessed several features that would make modern financial experts gasp in awe:
First, it was peer-to-peer. There were no intermediary clearing banks. From the moment the sender handed money to the water carrier to the moment the recipient received it, the funds never passed through any bank account or sovereign monetary system.
Second, it incorporated identity verification. Water carriers were typically fellow townspeople who knew both sender and recipient. This constituted a form of identity authentication far more reliable than SSL certificates: “You can run away, but your temple stays put.” In a Chaoshan village, every household’s composition, alleyway address, and extended kinship web lived vividly in the water carrier’s memory.
Third, its default rate approached zero.
This deserves special emphasis. Between the 19th and early 20th centuries, water carriers operated without collateral, insurance, or legal recourse. They routinely carried the entire savings of dozens of households—worth millions of RMB in today’s purchasing power. If a water carrier absconded, no one could catch him—or force repayment.
Yet they never ran.
Why? Because the core of this business was trust itself as the sole collateral. A single act of betrayal would instantly sever all ties with fellow townspeople across both Chaoshan and Nanyang—effectively ending the water carrier’s life within the Chinese diaspora community. This permanent social banishment carried far heavier consequences than any legal penalty.
Remittance Bureaus: From P2P to Institutional Networks
Over time, water carriers evolved into specialized operators—giving rise to remittance bureaus, dedicated institutions handling qiaopi transactions.
The emergence of bureaus upgraded qiaopi from “individual-to-individual” to “institutional network.” But unlike modern banks, bureaus remained privately owned, family-run, and networked—with branches in Nanyang and hometowns alike, bound together by native-place ties and familial trust.
How sophisticated was their fund flow? Let’s break it down:
Step 1: Overseas Chinese A walks into a local bureau in Nanyang, hands over 100 Thai baht, and instructs the bureau to send funds to family member B in Chaoshan.
Step 2: The bureau immediately issues A a “pi”—a combined letter and remittance slip—denominated not in baht, but in Hong Kong dollars or silver dollars.
Why not baht? This is one of qiaopi’s smartest innovations. Early transnational bureaus consistently used Hong Kong dollars as their settlement currency, because HKD was pegged to sterling, highly liquid, and widely accepted across Southeast Asia—effectively serving as a spontaneously adopted supranational settlement currency for the East Asian Chinese diaspora.
Sound familiar? It mirrors today’s crypto community’s demand for USDT/USDC: cross-border, bypassing exchange controls, deeply liquid, and universally trusted by participants.
Step 3: The bureau’s Nanyang branch ships the letter and remittance instruction back to its Chaoshan counterpart by sea—but rarely ships actual cash.
This is crucial. Mature bureaus cultivated long-term relationships with local import-export merchants in Nanyang. Funds sent from Nanyang to hometowns (Nanyang → Chaoshan) could be directly applied toward payments for goods imported from China (Chaoshan → Nanyang). These two flows offset each other, meaning only the net difference required physical cross-border transport.
This mechanism—today dubbed “netting”—powers SWIFT’s daily processing of trillions of dollars. Remittance bureaus implemented it a century earlier.
Step 4: Upon receiving instructions, the Chaoshan bureau dispatches a “pijiǎo” (letter courier) to deliver the funds and letter in person. Often walking dozens of kilometers, the courier knocks on doors, reads letters aloud for illiterate grandmothers and daughters-in-law, helps draft replies—and confirms receipt. That reply—the “return pi”—is then shipped back to Nanyang, completing the transaction loop.
No bank accounts. No government oversight. No central clearing system. Yet it ran steadily—for a full century.
Covert Remittances and the Dongxing Route
The most surreal chapter of qiaopi unfolded during wartime.
In 1939, Japanese forces occupied Shantou, severing all conventional remittance routes. Half a million families in overseas Chinese hometowns faced imminent destitution.
Overseas Chinese responded with a historic feat: they forged an underground remittance route.
Goods sailed from Nanyang to Haiphong, Vietnam; crossed the Sino-Vietnamese border at Dongxing; and were carried inland by porters into Guangxi, eventually reaching Guangdong’s overseas Chinese communities. Dubbed the “Dongxing Remittance Route,” it handled tens of millions of yuan annually at its peak.
When formal sovereign financial systems collapsed amid war, informal financial networks improvised an entirely new conduit.
Even more audacious were “covert remittances”: To evade Japanese and later Kuomintang inspections, overseas Chinese encoded remittance amounts in letters using coded phrases—e.g., “one sack of rice” meant a certain number of silver dollars; “five salted fish” signified a specific amount in HKD. This entire cipher system resided solely in the minds of water carriers and couriers—so even if enemies intercepted letters, they couldn’t decipher them.
During the War of Resistance, Zhou Enlai personally penned a thank-you letter in Wuhan to Tan Yixi, a Cuban overseas Chinese, after Tan smuggled anti-Japanese donations inside qiaopi envelopes—directly delivering funds to the Eighth Route Army’s Wuhan office.
What does this mean today? Imagine achieving, under sanctions against the U.S. dollar, SWIFT disconnection, and frozen bank accounts—an annual transfer of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of value, reliably delivered to designated recipients, via a grassroots consensus network.
Is this “censorship-resistant transaction”? A “off-chain ledger system”? A “community-based stablecoin clearing network”? Its inventors didn’t know these terms. All they knew was: Grandma is waiting for money. Children need food. The nation is at war.
A Financial Miracle We Can Never Revisit
Qiaopi, blockchain, and SWIFT represent fundamentally different interpretations of trust.
SWIFT embodies state-backed cooperation—built upon sovereign currencies, central banks, commercial banks, and regulatory coordination. Its strength depends entirely on international order’s stability. Cryptocurrency rests on mathematical and code-based trust—seeking cryptographic protocols and consensus algorithms to replace human and institutional trust.
Then what about qiaopi?
Qiaopi’s essence is clan-based, native-place, relational, and oath-bound trust. It has no mathematics—but it has genealogies, accents, hometown dialects. Its engine is a cultural consensus treating default as “social death.”
This is precisely what modern finance most desperately needs: trust itself as collateral.
Every so-called “innovation” in today’s finance is, at heart, an attempt to compensate for the erosion of this principle—through collateral, guarantees, regulation, insurance, legal recourse, credit scoring, KYC, AML. We build ever-more complex systems to recreate the simple reality of a water carrier carrying an entire village’s savings in his waistband—and never running.
The weight of this truth becomes tangible only through real people.
In the Guangxu era, Yang Jie—a Chinese migrant in Thailand—sent a qiaopi containing just ten characters: “Upon receipt of this letter, urgently redeem our daughter and bring her home.” With remittances interrupted, his wife had been forced to sell their daughter. Learning this, he was devastated—and rushed 50,000 yuan home, unable to write anything beyond “urgently.”
Chen Lianyin, a female overseas Chinese selling goods on Singapore’s streets, struggled to survive herself—yet learned her mother had injured her foot due to chronic hunger. She scrimped and saved to send money home: “Mother, lacking regular meals, injured her foot and cannot walk without support—upon hearing this, I wept uncontrollably.” She called this her “crime against filial duty.”
In the film, Grandma’s final qiaopi reads: “Though Siam is distant, my heart is anchored there; though apart, we stand side by side—above all, stay safe; that is reunion.”
Most qiaopi amounts were modest—HK$5, HK$10, HK$50—sent bit by bit, year after year. Over a century, generations of Chinese, thousands of remittance bureaus, and hundreds of thousands of water carriers and couriers delivered these small sums—and words of safety—across wars, revolutions, upheavals, and famines, arriving punctually at doorsteps in Chaoshan, southern Fujian, and Wuyi—places many would never again see.
No modern payment system has matched this feat’s financial engineering rigor under equivalent conditions.
And its entire technological stack consisted of just: a red-hulled ship, a water carrier speaking the same dialect, a faded waistband—and the four words: “Trust outweighs life itself.”
All the grand narratives of crypto over the past decade—decentralized cross-border payments, permissionless financial networks, SWIFT-bypassing global clearing, community stablecoins, trust-as-collateral—had already occurred, for a full century, along China’s southern coast—in forgotten villages, in the hands of illiterate grandmothers and daughters-in-law, strapped to the waists of uneducated water carriers.
This is perhaps the simplest—and most magnificent—story ever told about the word “trust.” And it’s one we may never revisit.
This article is dedicated to everyone who ever wrote on, signed, entrusted, or received funds through those yellowed sheets of paper.
And to everyone today still striving to rebuild such networks of trust.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
深潮TechFlow
