My first brush with a Chinese post office was in August 1994, shortly after I arrived in Wuhan to teach English at a medical university. Back then, mailing letters home to the United States was an arduous ritual that I undertook in a drab communications building. I’d jostle in a scrum, stretch a letter over the counter, and get the attention of an overwhelmed postal clerk, who would return my envelope with a strip of stamps and wadded-up change. I’d then head to a table with wood brushes planted in bowls of gooey paste, delicately apply postage, hand my letter back, and pray.
Notwithstanding its rough edges, that post office was a godsend and my only portal home, with international phone calls prohibitively expensive on my salary. But as with any public institution one takes for granted (until it fails, or there are schemes to gut or privatize it), I never thought about how China’s postal services came to be. Fortunately, that story has been told, and with great industry, in The Making of China’s Post Office by Weiping Tsai, a history professor at the University of London.
A major source for Tsai is writings by customs officials at treaty ports and foreign and Chinese workers who set up and staffed postal branches. Probably none are more valuable than those of British diplomat Robert Hart, an early and passionate proponent of a national postal office. Hart served as inspector general of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) for forty-eight years, assuming the post in the aftermath of the Second Opium War. One of his principles was that the CMCS and, later, China’s postal system, be “Chinese-owned” while designed on the British model. Fluent in numerous Chinese dialects and an earnest student of the country, Hart forged trusted relations with Qing court officials, including Prince Gong Yixin and Wenjiang, statesmen who helped found the Zongli Yamen (a de facto foreign affairs office) and, in assiduous ways, pursued modernization efforts.
The author devotes much space in answering a paradoxical question: How was a system as expansive and complex as a national post office formulated at the same time the Qing Empire was crumbling, and when the court was often not keen on the idea? The reality is that the tumult racking China in the second half of the 19th century often pushed the court’s hand, leading it to respond to pressure, accept compromise, and move forward. As the project weathered local and regional resentments, government and private corruption, violence and disorder, and outright confusion, China’s post office largely developed when and how it did because of—and not despite—the stresses felt by Qing leaders.
The court had its reasons for resisting the unification of postal services. For one, officials doubted its necessity. China for centuries had both a military relay courier system (for official use) and private-letter hongs, family-owned courier firms which were widespread and highly functional. By the late 1900s, China had also adopted a telegraph system and another semi-official mail service, the Wenbao Bureaus. These alternatives, with their uneven levels of efficiency, were mostly snuffed out soon after the republic’s birth. Notably, the telegraph has outlasted the others by more than a century but is on its last breaths for all practical purposes.
Domestic stability was also a concern. A modern post office would require the construction of extensive railway and telegraph lines in inland China, and officials feared security risks since foreigners would help plan routes, build infrastructure, and train workers. There was financial limitation immersed in face-saving politics; court officials said China wasn’t wealthy enough to pay for such an endeavor, and nor were they willing to rely heavily on foreign money and labor.
Into the 1890s, Chinese still weren’t accustomed to using postage stamps to represent payment.
Keeping all this in mind, it’s hard to overestimate what a radical notion that nationalizing postal services was, and what trials lay in its path. Commercial practices, some not yet existent, had to be adopted as universal. Into the 1890s, Chinese still weren’t accustomed to using postage stamps to represent payment. Lacking a unified central currency, China settled on the Mexican dollar, already in use for almost a century in the country, as the denomination for postal business. The Chinese studied foreign letter boxes to design their own, and emphasized to the public how these new contraptions (as well as access to stamps) made sending correspondence more private and secure, a stark departure from the past.
In addition, new thinking was needed to recruit laborers who could master skills for postal work. To foreigners in charge, few Chinese were equipped to fill postal jobs, especially high-level posts like mail inspectors or branch managers. Beijing had the best-educated men—a logical demographic for professional staffing—but they were mostly classical learners unfit for tedious and manual tasks, and they couldn’t converse in regional dialects or understand conditions in other parts of China. There were worries about the “institutional discipline” and honesty of Chinese clerks (and foreign staff, to be fair). It wasn’t until the turn of the century that more Chinese took educational and career paths readily applicable to the postal service.
For Chinese living inland, the mere presence of a postal system across a huge, disconnected territory was frequently unwelcome and misunderstood. Some provincial officials ordered mail to be confiscated, upset that the system was being rammed top-down through their jurisdictions. Although Chinese performed most postal jobs, and post office signage was written in Chinese characters, the concept that the system was “foreign-designed” but “Chinese-owned” was confounding. The peculiar bifurcation made post offices symbols of imperialism and, thus, targets during spells of anti-foreign fever.
The stigma was not totally undeserved. The project was a mass joint venture, and one largely contracted under force and persuasion over a half-century. After the Second Opium War, the Chinese court was pressured to accept terms that allowed the British, French, and Americans to open postal offices at treaty ports. One positive result of this was it let Chinese officials see firsthand how foreigners ran their own postal operations. The passage of time would yield ample opportunity to observe the occupiers in action; in 1915, seven foreign countries were still operating post offices in fifty locations in China.
The Boxer Rebellion ignited a violent inflection point in 1900, when outraged mobs protesting foreign occupation smashed up or burned many post offices. Once the dust settled, and, as ever, eyeing its survival, Qing officials rode a supportive wave of nationalism and ramped up investment in the Imperial Post Office (IPO), which had been established just four years prior. They rapidly increased Chinese staff (while maintaining a low number of foreign postal workers) and drew up more postal routes, especially in populous areas of eastern China. By the time the dynasty fell, routes had reached every corner of the country’s frontiers.
Tsai deserves high marks for displaying (and not just telling) China’s postal history.
Tsai deserves high marks for displaying (and not just telling) China’s postal history, presenting many images of chops, stamps, letters, postal documents, and post office façades and signage. Visuals also underscore that, above all, postal service is a geographical enterprise. The book’s slew of maps traces the growth of China’s sovereignty and its expansionist goals—from short, scraggly lines to routes crossing wide swaths of territory, including, by 1918, one from Beijing to Ürümqi, the world’s longest overland postal route at the time.
Mapping routes in a fledgling system wasn’t simple and, as with other aspects of planning, trial and error was often the modus operandi. Foreigners decided on a formal relay system to clarify routes, partly inspired by one mail carrier’s misadventure while tracing out the Beijing-Tianjin line in 1878, the first experimental route established on a western model:
He fell off his horse into a ditch near Caicun, about forty kilometers northwest of Tianjin. He picked himself up and rode on—toward Beijing, he thought. It was four hours before he realized he had been traveling the wrong direction, arriving back at Yangcun, where he had originally picked up the mail … His explanation was that the road conditions had rapidly changed from his previous journey along the route, as peasants had plowed the fields and changed the landscape.
Those who know Chinese will be gratified by Tsai’s generous use of Chinese pinyin and characters, and everyone wins when she places terms in historical contexts. In one case, she explains the etymology of jimi (羈縻, or “loose reins”), a somewhat flexible attitude towards modernization under foreign influence, which was in tension with “self-strengthening”, a principle calling for tenacity in defending territory and self-determination:
The concept of jimi can be traced back to The Grand Scribe’s Records (Shiji, 史记) of the Western Han dynasty (202 BC-9 CE), which referred to a policy of avoiding the use to military force and applying instead a diplomatic approach toward coexistence with other powers at the periphery.
The achievement of China’s post office cemented Hart’s mark on history. He has gone down as one of several foreigners who Chinese officials and historians have lauded for their consistent loyalty to the project, even amid decades of imperialism that they helped enforce. Hart died in 1911, just weeks before the Qing court was overthrown, thus missing the demise of a regime he had collaborated with his entire adult life.
Like at other chaotic periods China had faced in the previous half-century or more, postal services fell under assault in the last days of the Qing. Revolutionaries, regarding the post office as too valuable a tool for their enemy to use unfettered, destroyed postal buildings, looted their money, stole mail and packages, and otherwise disrupted or shut down postal work. Tsai writes that postal staff, who took seriously their role as responsible government servants, did what they could to defend their workplaces, including by safe-keeping postal funds and even burying stamps for later use.
The republic took fragile root, and the postal system survived, and the new government honored its resiliency and utility. As is often the case when public institutions are destroyed in the name of saving society, the victors massaged history and whitewashed their trashing of postal services, releasing an official report that flowerily read:
The Post Office … stood its ground, and, to the advantage of the Service and public alike, all parties shortly realised the inexpediency of interference, and the Post Office preserved inviolate its independence. The centuries-old Imperial dragon standard gave place to the five-barred flag of the Republic of China; but the Post Office, as before, went on.
Tsai’s meticulousness offers something for everyone, perhaps even at her own risk. Her style early on—a heavy reliance on thick narrative—makes some parts very slow-going. She interweaves a wide array of characters, critical historical events, and interpretations of all of these. Some granular details—data points, biographical minutiae, and more—could have been relegated to footnotes or an appendix (or even excluded) without diminishing the book’s quality.
In what might be judged as a quirk, Tsai notes the musical gifts of some western customs officials, perhaps to suggest the value of the arts on career mobility and professional camaraderie. Belgian Jules A. van Aalst, a skilled player of the piano, flute, and oboe with facility for the violin and cello, was a colleague of Robert Hart, who “appointed Val Aalst to attend the International Health Exhibition in London in 1884 and proposed he write a book on Chinese instruments for the exhibition.” Another profile is about Jean Paul Friedrich Jokl, an “excellent violinist” from Austria whose dazzling repertoire included Johan Brahms’ Hungarian Dances. Whatever the point, readers shouldn’t doubt that the hills were alive.
The book’s epilogue further tugs at the heart of history. Tsai wistfully recounts touring the General Post Office Building in Shanghai in the early 2010s. She ascends a stone staircase, enters a large room, and savors what’s been preserved from the grand structure’s completion in 1924—the high ceiling, tall wooden tables, and patterned floor tiles. The emotional crescendo is palpable and a fitting reward for readers, a letter that arrives at its destination.
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