Today, museums dedicated to qiaopi can be found in places such as Quanzhou city in Fujian province and Shantou city in Guangdong province, where archivists continue restoring and preserving hundreds of thousands of letters.
"We've seen a sharp rise in visitor numbers since the film Dear You was released," said Yang Dongmei, a tour guide at the qiaopi museum of the Shantou Archives, which houses more than 92,000 original qiaopi items.
Inside, visitors sit down with brushes, ink, and paper to write their own versions of the old letters.
The renewed interest has spread overseas as well.
Lan Hongchun said that many overseas Chinese are eager to watch the film, with audiences in Singapore, Australia, and France reaching out to ask about overseas release plans.
The production team is now fast-tracking international distribution efforts, hoping to get the film to audiences throughout the world as quickly as possible, he added.
