The Hidden History of China’s Post Office (2024)

When a young Robert Hart arrived in Shanghai in 1854 as a translator for the British consulate, he could hardly have anticipated that his life would be so closely intertwined with China’s evolution into a modern state. Few people have heard of Hart today, but in a career spanning nearly 60 years, this official from the rural market town of Portadown in what is now Northern Ireland played a transformative role in Chinese history.

This article is adapted from The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation by Weipin Tsai (Harvard University Asia Center, 450 pp., $75, February 2024).

As the inspector general of China’s Imperial Maritime Customs Service from 1861 to 1911, Hart initiated major infrastructure projects, from port facilities and lighthouses to meteorology and mapmaking services. But his most important program had to do with postal services.

From his very first meeting at the newly established Zongli Yamen, China’s foreign affairs ministry, Hart arrived with a comprehensive vision for Chinese modernization—one that included plans for a modern, state-run national post office based on the model recently adopted by countries such as Britain, Germany, and the United States.

Yet for all his successes, and despite dogged persistence, it took Hart 35 years to materialize a post office. This delay is one of the most intriguing historical questions of the period, and it takes us into the heart of Qing political dynamics and the struggle to direct the course of Chinese modernization. Whether to adopt foreign models of reform remains a tense issue in China today—as do the struggles of reformers to change entrenched institutions.

By 1861, the Qing court was finally prepared to accept that Western foreigners were in China to stay—along with their innovative weapons, an international treaty-based order, and new types of trade. Western powers had recently defeated China in the Second Opium War, and China was forced to ratify new treaties with Britain, France, Russia, and the United States. Though these treaties were different, they all included the opening of new ports, provisions for foreign legations to be stationed in Beijing, and permission for foreigners to travel in China.

In response to this new reality, China established the Zongli Yamen and launched a reform program called the Self-Strengthening Movement. Empress Dowager Cixi authorized many of these reforms. In the summer of 1861, after her husband’s death, Cixi staged a successful coup d’état against other imperial regents. The empress dowager—who liked to compare herself to her contemporary, Britain’s Queen Victoria—effectively ruled China from behind the curtain for most of the next 50 years.

The modernization projects of the Self-Strengthening Movement included agricultural reform; naval procurement and training; the creation of schools and military colleges with new curricula; and the establishment of railroads, telegraph, steamship routes, modern mining, and textile operations. Many of these projects relied on foreign capital, and foreigners helped deliver them.

Hart was one of these foreigners. In the years following the outbreak of the 1850 Taiping Rebellion, the largest civil war in China in centuries, many foreigners were employed by the Qing government in support of its military campaigns. They were also recruited to work in various modernization programs. The fledgling Customs Service that Hart inherited and shaped to his vision was a hybrid institution: Its highest-ranking officials were foreigners, while the organization collected tariffs for the government and represented the Qing Empire’s sovereignty.

Hart established a high degree of confidence and trust among the Manchu royal family, which ruled the Qing Empire, and high officials in Beijing who oversaw the Zongli Yamen. By the 1880s, the Customs Service had become one of the largest and most reliable sources of government revenue. China used the service’s tariff collections to service its foreign loans and pay its treaty indemnity obligations, but also as collateral to finance new projects. This brought Hart respect, but also suspicion, particularly as nationalist sentiment rose. This wariness was one factor that made it difficult for Hart to realize his plans for a post office.

Before the national post office was established, China had two main postal systems: military courier and private letter hongs. By the mid-19th century, the centuries-old military relay courier system, used only for important official communications, was moving toward collapse, as corruption was endemic and maintenance costs extremely high.

Meanwhile, private letter hongs—family-owned courier firms—had long proved their usefulness for merchants and ordinary people. The hongs operated with a storefront and would collect and deliver mail and small packages across a specified area. They also handled remittances, in conjunction with traditional Chinese banks. While firms were local or regional, they also participated in cooperative networks enabling deliveries over long distances. They often had their own dedicated transportation methods, such as on foot, by animal, or by boat. Networks of private letter hongs covered the whole of China, and indeed operated beyond its borders and at many locations overseas to service the Chinese diaspora. The hongs continued to exist after the establishment of the post office and were its most important rival.

Hart clashed with provincial governors, who repeatedly prevented his postal plans from being approved, in some cases in response to lobbying from private letter hongs. Li Hongzhang, the powerful governor-general of Zhili province and long-term ally of Cixi, commented in 1876 that some Chinese officials feared that if Hart were to succeed in launching and controlling a national post office, it might leave him with too much power, and it would become too difficult to ever remove him from his post. Li was also concerned about the extent of British power in China, and he was instrumental in shifting his country’s military procurement away from Britain to its rising European rival, Germany.

After several attempts to win approval from the central government for the establishment of an Imperial Post Office, Hart’s moment finally arrived when China suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895. China had to cede Taiwan to British-equipped Japan, and the Qing court was swamped by petitions arriving from officials and intellectuals in all corners of China to remove Li and to implement further reforms. These roundly criticized China’s tactical failures, and many of the petitions blamed them on Li, who had led naval affairs in northern China and signed the Shimonoseki Treaty that ended the war.

As Li became the scapegoat for the wider military failures, Hart found a powerful ally in Weng Tonghe, a member of the Grand Council and teacher of Cixi’s nephew, the young Emperor Guangxu. Weng supported reform and was willing to give backing to Hart. Despite Cixi’s reluctance, Li was not only removed from his governor-general position, but also sent to Russia to attend the coronation of Czar Nicholas II, an intentional move to take him out of the capital. On March 20, 1896, not long after Li left Beijing for Shanghai to catch a French ship to Europe, the Zongli Yamen presented the long-awaited proposal to establish the Imperial Post Office to the emperor, who approved it the same day.

Hart’s success in establishing a post office with a national presence mainly came down to the fact that it was left to develop without much direct interference from either central or local government. With only a modest budget to start with, provided by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, the post office was placed under the care of a core group of the agency’s foreign and Chinese staff. They had little or no prior experience running postal services, but they were given space to learn from mistakes and proceed at their own pace.

Hart also kept the post office away from the Universal Postal Union (UPU) because he thought full membership too early would be costly and interfere with the institution’s development. He complained that both France and Germany wanted to bully China into joining the UPU before it was ready for all incoming mail from abroad; China would also have to accommodate postal rates decided by other countries and pay UPU fees. There was a political dimension, too: Hart was concerned that joining the UPU might give the French greater leverage in how China’s post office was developed and run.

Hart and his team needed to make the post office acceptable to the Chinese public and win the collaboration of local governments. To achieve this, they introduced measures that would project the postal service’s “Chinese” elements, including placing Chinese employees in positions of authority in local branches, designing postage stamps and pillar boxes that featured Chinese characters and symbolism (such as Qing dragons), and establishing post offices in busy market locations or the precincts of larger temples. Hart’s team also co-opted local shops to double as postal agencies, which helped the post office expand outside major cities. This proved to be mutually beneficial: The locations became information hubs for communities, bringing with them greater social status for their owners.

The post office’s arrival had a striking visual impact on city, town, and even village landscapes, with new signboards, letterboxes, and grand post office buildings. Collectively, these helped project a new image for the Qing empire of a rising modern state.

On a practical level, the communication networks that Hart’s team developed intentionally moved away from the old military relay courier approach, which focused on finding the most direct routes between regional centers and the imperial capital of Beijing. Postal route design now had different priorities: Hart’s team emphasized the creation of more contact points on routes to maximize the speed and usability of services for the greatest number of people. Based on this logic, the team set up post offices in hinterland towns on borders between provinces. It also established express delivery points in non-treaty port cities and smaller towns that may have ranked poorly in the traditional administrative hierarchy but that had developed important commercial neighborhoods with significant mail traffic.

When the Qing government reassessed its central administration in 1906, it set up a new Ministry of Posts and Communications to bring together railway, steam transportation, telegraph, and postal services under one banner. This marked a significant shift in the government’s approach to managing transportations and communications to suit the need of a modern state. Prior to this time, these areas were considered foreign affairs and placed under the supervision of the Zongli Yamen; this change saw them formally re-designated as domestic matters.

For the government, the Imperial Post Office materialized at the right time, and not only because it showcased the country’s reform program. Efficient, cost-effective communications across the empire’s vast territory had been a problem for many decades, particularly at its periphery where its sovereignty was increasingly under challenge. For the frail Qing empire, the post office presented itself as a solution.

Consequently, along with its visible but seemingly mundane role of collecting and delivering mail, the post office carried the flag for two important missions: the construction of a unified communications network across China’s enormous land mass for use by the general public for the first time in Chinese history, and the projection of national sovereignty. The final reaches of postal routes were the end points of sovereign power over a vast territory.

The final years of the Qing empire, which met its end in the revolution of 1911, were a trying time as it struggled to reform amid widespread calls for change in the streets. While prestige projects struggled, the post office—quietly and humbly rolled out at ground level without a grand plan—provides a rare example of a reform initiative that was an unequivocal success.