Shanxi merchants
The 2010 paper "The Shanxi Banks" by Randall Morck and Fan Yang claimed that it was plausible that Shanxi merchants could have been inspired by these British banks to create the modern "piaohao". Shanxi merchant Li Daquan, who while running the Xiyucheng dyed goods company's operations, organized the silver shipments between the city of Tianjin and the province of Shanxi. The goods shipped to Tianjin would have first gone through Kalgan, where the Russian Kyakhta caravans would pass beneath the Great Wall. They proposed that Li Daquan had heard about how the European banking system worked through other Shanxi merchants that had done business in European Russia and that he decided to try it in China. Randall Morck and Fan Yang claimed that Li Daquan deliberately omitted saying that his ideas that established the "piaohao" were of European origin as an extreme culture of xenophobia existed in the Qing dynasty at the time.