How Chaoshan Business Was Built on Morals, Not Contracts

TOPICS

Subscribe to our newsletter

By signing up, you agree to our Terms Of Use.

FOLLOW US

About Us<br>|Contribute<br>|Contact Us<br>|Sitemap

VOICES & OPINIONHow Chaoshan Business Was Built on Morals, Not Contracts<br>Trust, not laws, underpinned century-old networks for remittances from overseas Chinese workers. Its legacy still informs China’s business culture today.

By Wang Yujiao<br>Jul 10, 2026#history

This is the second article in a series on China's southern Chaoshan region, exploring the history, culture, and identities behind its recent resurgence in the spotlight. Read Part 1.<br>In the Chinatowns of early 20th-century Bangkok, Chinese laborers who had just collected their wages would make their way to the qiaopiju, a private institution that handled remittances and correspondence on behalf of overseas Chinese communities. They would reach into their pockets and hand over nearly all their monthly earnings to the man behind the counter.<br>Most of these migrants had come from villages in the Chaoshan region, the eastern part of China’s Guangdong province, driven across the seas by war, poverty, and the pressures of survival. The money they earned wasn’t just for themselves. It was for the families they had left behind. And so, every payday, their priority was getting that money home as quickly as possible.

The clerk would flip open the ledger, record the amount, and ask for the recipient’s name, village, and household. Since many of these workers were illiterate, the qiaopiju also doubled as a letter-writing service. In the Chaoshan dialect, the men would dictate the words they wanted their families to hear:<br>“Has mother’s illness improved?”<br>“I sent the money. Please take good care.”<br>When it was all done, the worker would leave with nothing but a handwritten receipt. A few days later, the letter and remittance would depart Bangkok, via Hong Kong, Shantou, and other relay points, before finally reaching home.<br>More than a century on, the archive of qiaopi documents has been called the “Dunhuang of overseas Chinese history,” and in 2013, it was inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Much of the scholarship and artistic work surrounding qiaopi has focused on the letters themselves. These texts represent an irreplaceable collective memory, written jointly by emigrants and the families who waited for them. But qiaopi was never just about the letters. It was also about the money. That is where my research, conducted during my doctoral studies at the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda University in Japan, was focused.<br>Every qiaopi sent generated a handling fee for the qiaopiju. But my research found that, for many of these firms, the fee was only one piece of the revenue picture. The more significant profits often came from the currency exchange business. Look closely at the qiaopi documents themselves, and a curious pattern emerges. Many Chaoshan emigrants ended up in Thailand, where they earned Thai baht. Yet the currency recorded in their remittances was frequently Hong Kong dollars.

Why Hong Kong dollars? Because at the time, Hong Kong served as a crucial trade and financial hub connecting Southeast Asia with South China. Many qiaopiju operated exchange offices in Hong Kong, or worked with local money changers and banks there, converting baht into Hong Kong dollars before completing settlement and earning on the spread.<br>Some firms went further, weaving trade directly into the remittance process. After receiving baht from an emigrant in Thailand, they might use those funds to purchase rice, sugar, or cloth to ship to Hong Kong for sale; with the Hong Kong dollars earned, they would then buy goods needed in the Chinese market and ship them on to Shantou. In this way, money that would otherwise have to cross borders in cash was instead settled through the flow of goods. This reduced the risks of transporting cash while generating additional profit.<br>In other words, the qiaopiju was never simply a money-and-letters operation. It was a transnational commercial network that wove together trade, finance, and the lives of migrant communities.<br>But the truly remarkable thing about the qiaopiju isn’t its business model. It’s the question of why anyone trusted it in the first place.<br>Think about what those workers were handing over: nearly a full month’s income — money they had worked hard for, and which their families back home relied on. No wire transfer. No bank guarantee. No protective legal contract. Yet this web of private remittance houses, stretching thousands of kilometers across borders, held together for more than a century and almost never collapsed.<br>If your first instinct is to say “they had no other choice,” you’re only half right. The real answer lies in a mechanism far older than any contract: a trust-based network built on shared origins, kinship ties, reputation, and long-term relationships.

For Chinese emigrants living far from...