Introduction
The story of the modern Chinese postal service is highly instructive in understanding modern Chinese history. First, it reveals how— through lengthy and often energetic negotiations with both foreign and local powers—both the Qing and subsequent Republican governments managed to reform, extend, unify, and bring under state control China's postal service. The arrival of the national postal service itself had significant effects on the whole of society, and impacted on trading patterns, tariff management, smuggling prevention, and the distribution of print materials. Beyond institutional history and politics, the story of the postal service reflects those of the communities it touched. Further, from a grand perspective, it sits at the very heart of the web of new information networksFootnote 1 that were the engine of Chinese modernization in the greater context of globalization. The early history of the Chinese postal service—the focus of this paper—will reveal the complicated interactions between the Chinese and foreigners, and how this interaction served to further or hinder the aims of the Qing government at that time. In so doing, this paper will be an example to support the view that globalization, more than either colonialism or imperialism, provides a suitable perspective from which to view modern Chinese history.Footnote 2
Efforts to nationalize and unify the postal service were formally launched in March 1896, but in many ways this was a culmination of work initiated in previous decades that paved the way to establish a broader service. Beginning in 1878, a number of winter overland postal routes were established by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (hereafter ‘the Customs Service’). Gustav Detring (1842–1913), the commissioner of Tianjin Port at that time, under the orders of the inspector general of the Customs Service, Robert Hart (1835–1911), was assigned to manage this project. This paper will focus on the period from 1878 to 1896, prior to the inauguration of the national postal service, concentrating on the essential first few years after the trial began. It will examine several fundamental challenges encountered during the trial project, which set the scene for subsequent unification, reform, and expansion of the postal service.
In many ways this experimental project was a microcosm of the larger political and cultural issues facing China during the so-called ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’ when China struggled with the challenges of modernization amid considerable disagreement over the country's overall direction and the appropriate response to foreign influence. At the upper level there were conflicts between high-ranking statesmen and with foreign legations. In the middle, there were interactions between the Customs Service and central and local officials. At the bottom, there were discussions, some of them contractual, between the Service, its newly formed postal courier team, Chinese local people, and local postal agents.
These three layers will be the prism though which we will examine the complexity of the work involved in setting up the winter overland postal routes from Tianjin (also written as ‘Tientsin’: in the quotations ‘Tientsin’ will be used) to Beijing, Niuzhuang (Newchwuang, today's Yingkou), Yantai (Chefoo), Shanghai, and Zhenjiang (Chinkiang). This paper will explore, first, why there was a need for this experiment; second, the methods and procedures used in setting up the Customs Service; and, finally, the political difficulties encountered in implementing the project, which illuminate the complicated dynamics involved, including the machinations of the central administration as well as local commercial and administrative pressures.
Building on the complicated relationship between central and local powers, and between native and foreign staff of the Qing government, the story of the winter postal routes and its later development also touches upon a larger matter: the state-building efforts of the Qing government. Indeed, reflecting on the edict issued in 1896 that endorsed the creation of a national postal service, we naturally might draw a connection between this action and efforts to rebuild national pride after the first Sino-Japanese War. But this paper seeks to demonstrate that the relationship between establishing a state-run postal service (promoted and delivered by the Customs Service) and Qing state building is not straightforward. On the contrary, the Customs Service encountered many difficulties, some of them institutional. We will see that the winter postal service did not enjoy a particularly collaborative relationship with the provincial generals, nor did it enjoy clear and strong support from the Qing court. Neither did the general public see the need for a national postal service: long established private letter hongs dominated the market and provided a satisfactory service for ordinary people. Sailing against the wind of general consensus, then, the journey towards setting up the new postal service was a far from straightforward act of Qing nation building.
Why there was a need for this experiment
The reasons for the establishment of the experimental overland postal service are two-fold. The first was foreign legations’ requests to the Zongli Yamen (the Foreign Affairs Ministry which was established in 1861 after the Second Opium War) to take on the management of the mail service in the winter season, and the second was Robert Hart's long-term goal to establish a nationalized postal service.
After the Opium War in 1842, Western powers demanded a variety of rights, including rights of property ownership at the treaty ports, freedom to trade, and religious freedom. Unlike the situation in previous decades when foreigners were not allowed to establish themselves properly in China, the presence of the foreign communities in the ‘middle kingdom’ was legitimized by the setting up of settlements under a formal legal framework. Postal services between China, Hong Kong, and Britain (via India) during this time were contracted by the British government to the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company.Footnote 3 Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Post Office set up a branch in Shanghai in 1839, followed by the British Packet Agency, which set up branches in the first five treaty ports in 1844.Footnote 4 Prior to the era of the telegraph system, this was a natural development in the growth of the settlements and their mercantile and diplomatic clientele. Another step forward was taken by the settlement after the Arrow War, when Article IV of the Sino-British Treaty of Tianjin in 1858 gave British envoys the privilege of sending mail to and from any point on the Chinese coast, using their own couriers. The terms of the treaty were that they were to enjoy the same protection given to the couriers who carried dispatches for the Qing government.Footnote 5 Due to the ‘most-favoured nation’ clause, other foreign powers in China also gained postal privileges: a French service was set up in Shanghai in 1862 and an American one in 1867.Footnote 6
For most of the year, documents and packages from this patchwork of services were transmitted by steamship around the coasts and along the Yangtze River. However, in winter, especially from December to March, iced-up ports made such activity problematic. Under the Treaty of Tianjin, the Qing government was responsible for the safety of the legations’ correspondence, transported by government couriers, and a temporary solution was to use the couriers of the Zongli Yamen to transmit legations’ mail from Beijing to Zhenjiang and Shanghai.Footnote 7
In his study on the history of China's encounter with the West in the second half of the nineteenth century, Shougo Suzuki highlights Robert Hart's deep concern over China's weak central government and his promotion of progressive ideas and plans for strengthening the state. Suzuki places Hart in the lineage of ‘European International Society’ or the ‘English School’ in East Asia, which was mainly the province of diplomats. The discourse of this loose grouping was to urge countries like China to move beyond military reforms and to embrace change in other domestic matters in order to lift up their ‘standard of civilization’.Footnote 8 Suzuki's argument certainly has some validity. However, Hart's view on China's situation was more complicated than this, as from an early stage he noted a fundamental difference between China and Western countries: Chinese civilization was ‘not a Christian civilisation… there is a pride of race about them that leads them to tread upon the neck that bends, rather than to lift the head that touches the dust, when its owner is an alien.’Footnote 9 Hart's understanding of Chinese culture was reflected in his style of management at the Service, and also his dealings on the issue of the postal service.
The 1865 move of the Inspectorate General office from Shanghai to Beijing was accompanied by a transfer of responsibility for carrying foreign representatives’ mail.Footnote 10 Hart believed a modern communications network (including telegraph, shipping, and railways services) would benefit China a great deal. The timing, however, was premature for nationalizing the mail service, as the central government was not yet ready to face resistance from established interests, for example, national and local officials as well as merchants—each of these groups had strong connections to the existing military mail service and to local private letter hongs.Footnote 11 Around this time Hart, now inspector general, began a more focused consideration of the practicalities of establishing a national postal service for China.Footnote 12 He worked to promote his idea, but had no success until the Margary Affair took place in Yunnan Province in February 1875. This murder of a British diplomat and his entourage, who were on a mission to explore potential land trade routes, led to a diplomatic crisis with Britain. Hart was asked by the Qing government to assist Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), viceroy of Zhili Province and imperial commissioner, in the negotiations with Britain, represented by Thomas Francis Wade (1818–1895).Footnote 13
Hart saw the negotiations as a good opportunity to push for his idea of a Chinese postal service and he lobbied the Zongli Yamen, Li Hongzhang, and Wade in the hope that arrangements for the postal service would be included in both the negotiations and in the subsequent written agreements. Hart quietly informed the Zongli Yamen that the British might be pleased to see China develop such a postal service as it would be considered a sign of its intention to improve relationships with the foreign powers. The Zongli Yamen was happy to go along with this plan as it wanted to use this opportunity to have national ownership of the postal service written into the treaties in order to reduce the potential opposition from literati and other conservatives within China.Footnote 14 In these negotiations, Hart also pushed for China to create a centralized mint to produce a standardized currency across the empire—coinage was still being minted locally within China's provinces, which was an unsatisfactory state of affairs from a trading perspective.
Wade's attitude to these proposals was ambiguous, and ultimately neither the mint nor the postal service projects were even mentioned during the negotiations or in the Chefoo Convention that followed. Hart, in a letter to his London secretary, Duncan Campbell, written in January 1877, said of Wade that ‘our relations have lost the cordiality they once had. I cannot congratulate him on his treatment of “the Margary affair”… He was offered a Mint and Postal establishment, but he decided not to have them—or forget about them!’Footnote 15
This apparent ‘conspiracy of silence’Footnote 16 over the Chefoo Convention negotiations killed the idea of a mint, particularly after the provincial officials also seized the opportunity to argue against the proposal. As for the postal service idea, Hart was determined to stay with it. He believed that time was on his side,Footnote 17 and he thought that as long as he could keep things moving along, then ‘a practice might grow into something better sooner or later if kept alive’.Footnote 18 With Li Hongzhong's promise to ‘father it officially’Footnote 19 one day, Hart decided to push forward during the problematic winter season with an experimental postal service that would be part of the existing Customs Service system.
Before exploring the details of the Customs Service's winter overland postal routes, it is necessary to understand the state of established postal arrangements in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were at least six kinds of postal systems in China:Footnote 20
1. The Imperial Relay Service (I-zhang) was for official mail only, and included both mounted couriers and foot couriers.
2. The Office for the Transmission of Government Correspondence (Wenbao ju) was an offshoot of the Imperial Relay Service, but it only transmitted correspondence to and from Chinese envoys abroad. This office was managed by the Zongli Yamen. The headquarters were set up in Shanghai in 1876, with a station in Tianjin; it mainly used the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company and other major foreign postal agents and shipping companies in Shanghai. Due to its success, several high-ranking provincial governors also set up similar offices to transmit their physical and telegraphic correspondence.Footnote 21
3. Private letter firms/hongs (minxinju, or xinju) were established by private Chinese firms to deliver letters for the public. The letter hongs were generally highly regarded and trusted by the Chinese populace. Many were associated with traditional banks and they not only transmitted mail, but also cheques and money. They provided a reliable service, with flexible hours and payment methods. Letter hongs were used and held in high regard by some Chinese Maritime Customs foreign employees, for example, Cecil Bowra and C. Lenox Simpson.Footnote 22
4. Foreign private postal agencies were often associated with commercial firms and shipping companies at the treaty ports.
5. Local or municipal postal services were set up either by local municipal councils or by foreign legations in the treaty ports. The British set up the Hong Kong Post Office in 1834, and soon opened branches in the main treaty ports. The Shanghai Municipal Council also established a local Post Office in July 1863.Footnote 23 Alongside this, the United States, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia also had their own postal services in China. These became subject to international negotiations when China set up its national postal service.Footnote 24
6. The postal service of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, the main topic of this paper.
The Customs Service faced substantial resistance from the existing postal systems when it tried to implement a plan for a unified, national state-run postal service in China. This resistance came from three main quarters. The first centred on the Imperial Relay Service. By the late nineteenth century, it was apparent from difficulties encountered during internal rebellions and conflicts with foreign powers that the Imperial Relay Service was no longer able to transmit documents reliably and efficiently. However, as with opposition to other modernizing schemes during the ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’, there were significant voices within the Qing administration prepared to fight any change.Footnote 25 In the case of the latter, there were substantial vested interests in the preservation of such a long-established government service, and opposition to any plans for its reduction or closure was strong.Footnote 26 The local letter hongs, meanwhile, had substantial local commercial interests to protect and threats to them attracted the opposition of important local powerbrokers, including local gentry, intellectuals, and merchants. Finally, foreign post offices were concerned at any threat to their ‘legitimate interest in providing for the ocean transport of overseas mails’, and were reluctant to hand over their rights to any potentially untrustworthy institution in China.Footnote 27
Against these forces, the Customs Service's regional scheme for experimenting with overland postal routes in winter to connect important northern locations appears to have been calculated carefully to minimize direct opposition. From the winter of 1878, during Hart's leave in Europe, four principal postal routes were launched under Detring's direct supervision.
How the routes were planned and organized
Route 1: Tianjin to Beijing
Detring joined the Customs Service in April 1865, aged 23. He was made an acting commissioner in March 1872, and although he remained in this post in Tianjin for some time, he was formally confirmed as Tianjin commissioner on 1 October 1877.Footnote 28 When Detring was asked by Hart to carry out experimental work to establish the overland postal routes for the winter season in Tianjin, Detring had already been established in Tianjin for at least four years and had built up relationships with local merchants and important officials. These contacts proved invaluable for the management of the postal routes project.
In his March 1878 report to Robert E. Bredon and William Cartwright, who were the joint acting inspectors general at the time, Detring gave an initial account of how the winter overland postal route between Tianjin and Beijing should function.Footnote 29 As this was the shortest and most important route for this trial, Detring placed the experiment in the hands of Hu Yongan (Yong-an), a reliable employee of Tianjin Customs, who held the position of porter (ting chai). Although this was a fairly low-ranking post, Hu had prior experience in delivering mail for the Customs Service as he had been called upon to set up a relay line between Tianjin and Beijing. The line was estimated at 230 li (around 130 kilometres) on which there were three stops: Yang village (Yang tsun), Hexiwu village (Ho hsi wu), and Zhangjiawan village (Chang chia wan).Footnote 30
Yang village, Hexiwu village, and Zhangjiawan village were important places for traffic between Beijing, Tianjin, and the south, both for the transmission of official correspondence and for the transport of commodities, including grain. Official stations had been set up to accommodate couriers passing through on either horses or boats, some dating back as far as the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368),Footnote 31 as well as hotels and tea houses for ordinary passengers. These places had all witnessed the ebb and flow in prosperity that accompanied the changing levels of traffic on the region's canal, and were obvious choices as stops on the experimental overland postal route.
The following poem gives an impression of how these places had witnessed the ups and downs of courier traffic:
‘In Praise of the Imperial Relay Service in Yang village’
The little station of the Imperial Relay Service is by the river mouth.
The grass of the place is immensely tall, and it almost hides the entrance to the thatch-roofed hall.
There is an old well by the front gate, and a few weeping willows below the stairs.
The station has been quiet for long time and is covered by dust; the only noise is a flock of birds flying over the wall.
The only people passing through are government couriers, and I feel I am like a wooden doll, with clothes on but with an empty heart. Footnote 32
This route between Tianjin and Beijing was certainly already familiar to Hu Yongan and his men. By continuing to use it, Hu's couriers not only had the benefit of familiarity, but also access to the existing inns and tea houses. The dispatch timetable was carefully calibrated. For regular mail, couriers were required to leave Tianjin before sunset so the mail would reach Beijing by the morning of the next day, but foreign mail destined for Beijing was to be dispatched immediately with the aim of getting it to Beijing before its gates closed. In the return direction, mail was to leave Beijing daily at 4 pm, to arrive at Tianjin on the morning of the following day. Mail for foreign countries, Shanghai or the treaty ports to the west or south of Shanghai was to be gathered together and wrapped in sealed bags addressed to the Postal Department of Shanghai Customs House. Mail to Yantai and Niuzhuang from Beijing was to be put in the bags addressed to the Postal Department of the Tianjin Customs House.
The couriers were required to wear uniforms, which included an official hat and a ‘black waistcoat with red border and white breast shield’, bearing the characters ‘Tianjin Maritime Customs Postman’ (Jin haiguan xinchai). Each courier was required to carry a passport (Huzhao) issued by Detring.Footnote 33 The initial agreement with Hu Yongan was that these uniformed couriers would deliver up to 40 catties (18 kilograms) of mail within 12 hours in good weather conditions. However, this level of service soon proved unachievable. Two months after the experimental overland route was launched, the service was judged unsatisfactory.Footnote 34 Hu and his men managed the trip on average in 17.5 hours. The fastest trip was 14 hours, the slowest, 19 hours and 45 minutes.
The condition of the horses and the state of the roads were the two major factors in the variations in trip times. As the couriers had to travel during the night, in the dark, they lost their way more than once. Once, an experienced hand was carrying mail to Beijing. He fell from his horse into a ditch near Cai village (Tsai tsun), between Yang village and Hexiwu village. He picked himself up and rode on again towards Beijing—it was four hours before he realized he had been travelling in the opposite direction, after arriving at Yang village where he had originally picked the mail before his fall. His only explanation was that the road conditions had rapidly changed, as the peasants must have ploughed the field and changed the route.Footnote 35
Following these problems, and in order to check out the road conditions and the logistics himself, Detring made a dry run during the daytime, without mail, and completed the trip from Tianjin to Beijing in 12 hours. Hu Yongan was asked to drop out temporarily to rebuild and reorganize his team. In the meantime Detring asked another local man, Wang Changfa, a Decheng native letter hong, and his firm to manage this line.Footnote 36
Based on his experience, and on Hu Yongan's original trials, Detring believed that the relay system was still the right solution for implementing a sustainable service. Very soon Hu's team returned, and the line was confirmed as having three stations, 12 good men (three men in both Tianjin and Beijing, two men each in Yang village, Hexiwu village, and Zhangjiawan village), and 16 horses.Footnote 37 Hu also brought in ponies with mountain experience to cope with the roads in the direction of Beijing and Dagu Port, the most important sea port of Tianjin. Hu was also responsible for selecting his team members, paying them, and maintaining discipline.
Route 2: Tianjin to Niuzhuang
Unlike the Tianjin to Beijing route, which was relatively short and straightforward, the line between Tianjin, Niuzhuang, and Yantai required more careful planning. The route was estimated at 1,200 li, more than 700 kilometres. Shanhai Pass, the critical gateway between Beijing and northeast China, was the chosen passage for the winter overland route between Tianjin and Niuzhuang. To initiate the service, a porter named Guan Fu was sent to the station in Shanhai Pass, to supervise the mail exchange.Footnote 38 Both Tianjin and Niuzhuang would despatch mail every Saturday at noon, and it would then take three days from Tianjin to reach the Shanhai Pass. Mail would subsequently arrive in Niuzhuang from Tianjin in eight days, and vice versa.Footnote 39 The couriers provided their own mounts and they could carry up to 60 catties (approximately 30 kilograms) of mail.Footnote 40
Apart from the Tianjin line, Niuzhuang also had a direct mail connection with Yantai in winter, discussed below.
Route 3: Tianjin to Yantai
The Tianjin to Yantai winter overland postal service had two essential components.Footnote 41
The first was Tianjin, which functioned as the central meeting point for the mail exchange between Yantai and Niuzhuang during the winter season. In winter, the steamers stopped running, but the nearby coastal and river routes remained available to smaller boats for a time. Letters and correspondence for Niuzhuang in the care of the Yantai Customs House were sent to either Tianjin or Dagu via the Hai River, weekly. After this mail arrived, it was transmitted further north by the overland couriers. After the water routes became impassable due to ice, light mail, such as correspondence and despatches, was sent by overland couriers between Tianjin and Yantai; couriers from each side met at Qihe (Chi ho, on the opposite side of the Yellow River from Jinan) in Shandong Province.Footnote 42
Second, heavy mail was sent by junk from Yantai to Xiaoping Island on the Liaodong promontory in northeast China, in the charge of a Chinese Maritime Customs Service boatman. The mail was handed to an employee of the Native Customs Station there and transferred to the Niuzhuang Customs House. When the boatman returned to Yantai, he would also carry mail.Footnote 43
By engaging the influence and resources of the Customs commissioners in these three locations, Detring and his Chinese assistants were able to kick start this part of the service and to fine-tune transportation methods and relay arrangements in order to cope with the geographical peculiarities of each route. However, compared with the difficulties in initiating the route from Tianjin to Zhenjiang, discussed next, all three routes described so far were relatively straightforward to implement.
Route 4: Tianjin to Zhenjiang
As one of the second-wave of treaty ports, opened in 1858, Zhenjiang's already significant role increased markedly. It sat in a strategic spot on the Grand Canal, connecting north and south, and was regarded as one of the most important locations in the Yangtze River area for transportation and commercial reasons.Footnote 44
From the time the Customs Service started to transport letters for legations as well as its own correspondence, the Zhenjiang Customs House was the station used to consolidate the mail that came from Shanghai, south of Shanghai, and the Yangtze River, bound for the north. At the same time, all the mail sent from the north through Tianjin to Shanghai and beyond was transmitted to this port before being dispatched to its final destination.
This principle was retained in the design of the Tianjin to Zhenjiang route, but it proved to be the most challenging aspect of the whole exercise for Detring. This is because, first, at 2,000 li or over 1,200 kilometres, it was the longest route in the service trials. Second, in geographical terms the landscape was extremely varied, and included the north China plains, a mountain range, and complicated water routes, such as the Yellow River, the Huai River and the Grand Canal system: this complexity certainly required the couriers to use multiple types of transport. Third—and perhaps most significantly—the route stretched through three provinces and met with considerable political difficulties.
The previous three routes were easier for Detring to manage, as most of their sections fell within the administrative boundary of Zhili Province, where the Zongli Yamen and Li Hongzhang could apply their influence easily and directly. By contrast, the Tianjin to Zhenjiang route also passed through Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, and was therefore subject to greater political interference, at a time (during the Self-Strengthening Movement) when Chinese politics, including provincial politics, was highly complex and somewhat volatile. This route also became enmeshed with many local and regional interests. This will be explored fully in the following section.
Politics and pitfalls
Initially, the trial of the Tianjin to Zhenjiang winter route was a failure, and threw up problems far worse than those encountered between Tianjin and Beijing. But before exploring the reasons for this, it is necessary to explain Detring's approach to the creation of this route and where the difficulties lay.
Detring's starting point was an existing Chinese Maritime Customs courier service from Tianjin to Zhenjiang, which had been running since 1865. According to Henry C.J. Kopsch, who became the first postal secretary in 1896, during this period the service between these two places was initially rather good. The average time taken by the Service couriers travelling to Beijing from Zhenjiang was 10 days, and they occasionally managed the trip in ‘8 ½ days, at the rate of 91 ½ miles a day’.Footnote 45 However, during this time, the Customs Service couriers did not carry mail for the general public. Indeed, they transmitted very few letters in total (only nine pieces of mail were dispatched from Kopsch's office during that season, and eight received). In addition, the couriers enjoyed certain privileges on the roads, in a similar fashion to Qing government couriers.
In contrast to this existing, low-volume Service arrangement, Detring wanted to create a service that would also transmit mail for the wider Chinese populace. The method he adopted at first was to collaborate with local Chinese letter hongs. He wrote: ‘My chief study has been and is still, the treatment of Chinese mail matters; my object being to bring, by agreement, under our control the existing private postal establishments, and make them act as collectors and distributors of mails matter of Chinese origin.’Footnote 46
It was reasonable for Detring to want to work with the existing Chinese letter hongs, as the Chinese regarded the foreign mail agents’ service as slow and inefficient, due to the language barrier and differences in work ethic. Not only did Chinese letter hongs charge less for delivering mail, they also used every possible mean of conveyance and worked until midnight. They were also prepared to put in more effort for urgent mail in return for some financial compensation: a price could usually be arrived at by bargaining.Footnote 47
In addition, when a Chinese letter was sent from abroad to an address inland, it was almost impossible for either foreign postal offices or foreign letter agents to deliver it. With the increase in the numbers of Chinese overseas, the amount of mail from steamers arriving in treaty ports had increased substantially, and this became a big source of business for the letter hongs. Under the approach used by the local letter hongs, ‘Before the steamers had came to anchor, the letters would be thrown into boats, sorted by the agents as they were rowed ashore, and were in the hands of those for whom they were intended well ahead of the regular mail.’Footnote 48
Having worked in the Customs Service for more than ten years, Detring considered that the best way to set up a workable postal service was to include Chinese delivery agents and to get the latter work for him. It is worth noting that Detring's new couriers only delivered mail to and from the formal treaty ports; they did not deliver mail to each individual recipient. In Shanghai, Detring collaborated with the city's Post Office for the final local delivery.Footnote 49 However, in the north, particularly in the area around and beyond Tianjin with which he was familiar, his priority was to attempt to create a service using Chinese firms to carry out the work. His decision was therefore, first, to contract an agency entirely outside the Customs Service system to carry out the main courier work; and, second, to invite a local letter hong to become the agent for locally distributed Chinese mail which was transmitted by his trial couriers.
Detring's enthusiasm for the project rapidly became known to locals and he was soon approached by Dachang, a long-standing commercial firm in Tainjin. According to Detring's information, Dachang and its manager Liu Guifang were well connected and they had branches in other northern ports and Shanghai. Dachang seemed to be able to offer the very kind of help that Detring wanted, and so he entrusted this firm to be his temporary letter agent to manage the Chinese mail. According to their mutual understanding, Dachang was to open postal agencies at Beijing, Niuzhuang, Tianjin, Yantai, and Shanghai, and these would be called ‘Huayang shuxinjguan’ (Hua Yang Shu Hsin Kwan, Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency).Footnote 50
In order to make sure these newly opened Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency branches in other towns worked in the way Detring wanted, Wu Huan, a Service clerk who was sent by Hart to assist Detring at the beginning of the trial, was appointed as supervisor. Wu, however, later was revealed to be quite a character and caused significant trouble—as we shall see below.Footnote 51
Detring agreed that Dachang and the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency would keep the postage fees for all the Chinese mail they collected, and that they would also be allowed to decide postage rates in order to compete with other native letter hongs. In return, the principle was established that the Customs Service in Tianjin would not be responsible for the costs of setting up these branches or for their maintenance. Based on this arrangement, the experimental postal couriers would not only carry the mail from the postal department of the customs houses, but also that of the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency. The latter would transmit the Chinese letters that arrived with the trial postal couriers to local recipients.
The news of the establishment of the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency in those major treaty ports in north China was publicized in Shenbao, a widely circulated daily Chinese-language newspaper, which generously gave it positive support by writing about the Agency in its editorial section for several days running. Even though Shenbao was sensitive to the impact this new establishment would have on the business of existing native letter hongs, it still argued that both the Chinese government and people would both benefit from having a national postal service.Footnote 52 However, Shenbao's keen, indeed almost unreservedly supportive, attitude towards the idea of a national postal service might be read as something of a self-interested position: for example, it might have hoped that a state-owned postal service would allow Shenbao to be circulated more widely and cheaply, but it is worth mentioning that at this time, Shenbao was only in its sixth year of existence and its British owner, Major Ernest Major (1841–1908), was still very much involved in its editorial line as well as its commercial operation.Footnote 53 This positive stance towards a Chinese national post office might also have been a way for Major to show his support for the high-profile, foreign-run Chinese Maritime Customs Service.
In addition to the agreement with the Dachang firm, which also involved setting up the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency at different locations in the northern ports with help from Wu Huan, Detring entered into a contract with Tong Zaitian, another Tianjin man, to establish a courier team for the trial run from Tianjin to Zhenjiang. Tong Zaitian was a ‘high military graduate and Brevet Colonel (Houxuan canjiang erdeng shiwei)’, and he was recommended to Detring by Liu Guifang and a local traditional bank, Yuantai. Detring found no reasons to distrust his ‘Chinese advisers’ and decided to go along with this proposal.Footnote 54
The Tianjin to Zhenjiang relay included five intermediate stops and its target was to take up to nine days for a completed one-way trip. Costs would be shared equally between the Tianjin and Zhenjiang customs houses. Apart from Tong Zaitian himself, Detring had appointed another five men to act as subordinate officers at the five stops. As before, Detring asked Li Hongzhang, who was stationed in Tianjin at that time, to issue passports for the whole team; meanwhile Detring himself also issued passports to the couriers.
However, when Detring asked Li Hongzhang to issue these passports, Tong Zaitian's real character was revealed. Li was very surprised to learn that Tong Zaitian was the person with whom Detring had concluded his contract for setting up the couriers. Li revealed that Tong had been taken to court by a district magistrate (Zhixian) in Tianjin, as he had been involved in several fights with some wealthy locals. After hearing this, Detring immediately asked Li if he should terminate the contract; after a few moments’ silence, Li asked Detring to keep the contract running, so that Tong might use the opportunity to prove his trustworthiness.Footnote 55
The first few trips along the route went well; however, less than a month into the trial, the couriers and mail were detained in Shandong (see below for why this incident occurred). After this incident, there followed a flurry of communication (formal despatches, informal letters, and personal meetings) between the key participants: Detring; Li Hongzhang; the Zhenjiang Custom commissioner, James Twinem; Robert Bredon, who was temporarily in charge of the Inspectorate General during Hart's absence; the Tianjin customs superintendent, Zheng Zaoru; and Deng Qixian (Teng Chi-Hsian), who was a trusted clerk attached to Tianjin Customs House sent to Shandong to locate the missing mail.
Detring wrote to Bredon relaying Deng Qixian's account of the situation in Shandong, and asked him to seek assistance from the Zongli Yamen.Footnote 56 Detring went on to exchange several letters with Li Hongzhang, requesting him to write to the Shandong governor to explain the work that was being carried out by the couriers.Footnote 57 Concurrently, Detring also held several meetings with the Tianjin customs superintendent Zheng and tried to win his support. Through Zheng, Detring also had to answer urgent enquiries coming from the Shandong provincial judge, Nieh Ssu.Footnote 58 The judge asked Zheng to inform Detring that the whole courier operation should be abolished, together with the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency.
Originally Detring thought that intervention from Viceroy Li would immediately resolve the problem, but it did not work out that way. On the contrary, the local officials in Shandong continued to raise obstacles. For around a month, the couriers remained in detention in both Tai’an (Tai-an) and Dezhou (Te-chow) counties, and the staff of the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency in Jinan, where the Shandong governor was resident, were expelled.Footnote 59
It is helpful to consider the perspectives of the Shandong officials, Li Hongzhang, and Detring respectively.
The Shandong officials’ perspective
There were a number of reasons why the Shandong officials detained the couriers and impounded the mail, enumerated below:
1. It was wrong for Detring to employ Tong Zaitian, as he had a record of violence and a reputation for offending local officials, and the Shandong government was correct to arrest him.
2. Detring had no formal authority to issue passports to the couriers; the Shandong authorities also did not accept the passports issued by the customs superintendent of Zhenjiang.Footnote 60
3. The Shandong authorities questioned the right of the couriers to wear uniforms, use flags, carry weapons during the night, and whether they should be allowed to use horses as a means of transportation.Footnote 61
4. There had been no prior agreement with the local authorities over the establishment of the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency in Jinan; in fact, the Shandong governor had not been consulted about any aspect of the postal experiment. According to Deng Qixian, who had by this time become Detring's eyes and ears in Jinan, ‘the Governor felt vexed at not having been communicated with and informed of the establishment of the postal service’.Footnote 62
Li Hongzhang's perspective
Although Li had agreed both morally and in principle with Hart's proposal to conduct the postal trial, there were no formal edicts or memorandums from either the emperor or the Zongli Yamen to support the experiment. While the provisions of the Tianjin treaties made the Qing government responsible for ensuring the security of the correspondence of legations through governmental couriers, Detring's experimental postal method went beyond this commitment, as the service trial involved private contractors and letter hongs. So when the Shandong government pointed out that this postal trial was not covered by the Tianjin treaties, Li could not argue the point. He also had to accept two further points made by the Shandong authorities regarding the validity of the passports issued by Detring, and the inappropriateness of employing Tong Zaitian.Footnote 63
Detring's perspective
Although Detring did not report the establishment of the winter postal route to either the Shandong authority or the Tianjin local authority prior to its launch, he had assumed this had been done either by the Zongli Yamen or by Viceroy Li. In addition, as he had previously discussed the trial with Li and had also obtained passports from him, he had believed that there wouldn't be a problem with the local authorities.Footnote 64 He maintained that the five passports he had issued were simply further documents under the cover of Imperial Commissioner Li's passport, and that they merely carried the seal of the Tianjin customs commissioner.
Detring claimed that the uniforms worn by the couriers and the staff of the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency were not provided by him, but by the Dachang firm itself. He was happy to ask them to cease using flags and uniforms, so long as the mail could still be transported by horse, so as to avoid any delay in the transmission of correspondence for the legations. Detring argued that although he had not provided the weapons carried by the couriers, he could see the reason for carrying them as there were many bandits in the Shandong area.Footnote 65
Regarding Tong Zaitian, Detring reminded Li that he had recommended dropping him as soon as he found out about his troubles at court, and that it was the viceroy who had wanted to keep Tong in position.
However, underneath all the debates and recriminations, it seems clear that the main reason for the Shandong incident was the poor relationship between Li Hongzhang and the Shandong governor, Wen Ge. Deng Qixian's report confirmed this, and in his letter to Bredon, Detring also pointed out that Li Hongzhang did not tell Wen Ge about the postal plan in advance because of their mutual antipathy.Footnote 66
Detring's own statement of self-defence over the incident is very enlightening about the wider issues involved:
When undertaking the experimental postal work I was fully prepared to find that every step in advance in this matter would call forth numerous difficulties. But the postal experiment was made for the express purpose to find out of what nature those difficulties would be and also in order to enable us to judge whether or not we were qualified to overcome them. Not a partisan of timid dodgery, and convinced of the good wishes, if not of the support of some of the leading Statesmen of this country who wish to advance China's development, I mustered the limited means placed at my command took the disposition which within a few days had to be taken and pushed on.Footnote 67
Detring certainly felt the repercussions of this Shandong incident and, given the political climate, he was not able to keep to his planned courier schedule between Tianjin and Zhenjiang. Thus, he put the following temporary solutions in place:
• Mail to the south was transmitted to Zhenjiang from Tianjin every Tuesday at noon by the messengers hired directly by the Tianjin Customs, which took up to 12 days. Every Friday the mail was sent to Beijing and transmitted to Zhenjiang by the Zongli Yamen's couriers.
• Mail from the south, from Europe, and mail that was made up by the Postal Department of the Shanghai Customs House to the inspector general and legations was transmitted by the Zongli Yamen's couriers; the ordinary mail was carried by messengers directly hired by the Customs.Footnote 68
Detring also expressed a sense of grievance. He said many people held him responsible for the withholding of the mail, and that only a few people would understand the importance of the postal experiment, and the cause of its failure. He added:
I have accepted without murmur the blame whether deserved or not and, treating the detention of mails with due earnestness… I have nothing to hide, nothing to regret respecting my action… At the same time however, I would not draw into difficulties and become a source of embarrassments for the Inspectorate. Should therefore my action and views as reported in the above not [be] upheld and supported, I would beg for permission to abdicate the management of postal affairs and hoping that you will think it worth while to provide for the continuance of the undertaking itself.Footnote 69
When Hart read this statement on his return to Beijing in May 1879, he considered removing Detring's postal responsibilities, even asking Campbell to look for him in England for a suitable person for postal work.Footnote 70 By the end of that same year, however, he had decided that it was better to keep Detring in his post, and later appointed him ‘commissioner for postal matters’.Footnote 71
With this support and reassurance, Detring continued to adjust and improve the design of the four overland postal routes. After his bitter experience in Shandong, he decided to modify the relationship between the Tianjin Customs House and the private contractor for the overland postal routes. As Detring was satisfied by the work of Hu Yongan in managing the Tianjin to Beijing route, he decided also to entrust him with managing the Tianjin to Niuzhuang and Tianjin to Zhenjiang lines as well. Following Hu's recommendation, more men were recruited into the Customs’ experimental postal system and some additional organizational changes were made.
To make the organizational structure clearer, Hu Yongan was made courier chief (zong xinchai), and the men he placed in the important exchange stations were named ‘station masters’ (xunyi). There was a station master in each postal branch. Hu Yongan was responsible for selecting and training the couriers (xinchai), and many couriers were chosen from the porter level at the Tianjin Customs House for the Tianjin to Zhenjiang route. There were three station masters at the Tianjin to Zhenjiang line, and their duties included taking note of the time of arrival and departure of couriers, inspecting the mail passing through, ensuring couriers were ready and in place for their relay exchanges, ensuring the recovery of any lost or detained mails, and reporting to the Customs Service commissioners on any important matters that arose. Station masters had to be able to ‘read, [and] express their thoughts intelligibly on paper’.Footnote 72 By doing things in this way the couriers would have a closer connection to the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and could avoid breaching the Tianjin treaties by using private contractors to carry mail for legations.
After departing from Tianjin, the couriers exchanged mail at Jinghai county (Ching-hai-hsien), 60 li south of Tianjin, entered Shandong province by passing though Cangzhou (Chang-chow) and Dezhou (Te-chow), and arrived at Qihe for another exchange. A station master was placed in Qihe to oversee the crossing of the Yellow River. After that, the mail was carried by large donkeys, mules or horses to Qingjiangpu (Ching Kiang pu, today's Huaiyin city) in north Jiangsu Province. From Qingjiangpu to Zhenjiang, small fast boats were used. Under the supervision of Hu Yongan the route between Tianjin and Zhenjiang—2,000 li—took around 12 days, and 16 days for trips in which there were more than 30 catties of mail.Footnote 73
As previously noted, in setting up the experimental service, Detring had relied heavily on his Chinese advisers, including his subordinates in the Tianjin Customs House. Two men from the Customs, Wu Huan and Deng Qixian, were particularly trusted. Deng Qixian, a porter of the Tianjin Customs House and a Nanjing native, assisted Detring in inspecting the postal routes and was also sent (as mentioned above) to Shandong to help in searching for and collecting the missing mail. Detring was very impressed by his work and continued to employ him in the Customs system.Footnote 74 Deng was also ‘lent’ to the Dachang firm to set up a Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency branch in Beijing and was instructed to report to Detring directly.
The ultimate goal of this trial was to bring the postal service in China under central state control. Hence, the experimental postal service had to include Chinese mail. In this regard, Detring initially believed it was necessary to collaborate with Chinese firms and use them to deliver Chinese mail locally in the treaty ports. The Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency was allowed to set postage rates in order to compete with other local Chinese letter hongs and keep the postage charge on any mail collected by them.Footnote 75 While, in principle, the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency had to manage their own finances, in actual fact the Service was involved in both personnel and financial arrangements. For example, at the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency branch in Beijing, the Tianjin Customs House not only paid Deng Qixian's wages, but also those of Deng's assistant, a bookkeeper, three letter carriers, and two ‘coolies’. These arrangements illustrate the complicated relationship between the Tianjin Customs House and Chinese private companies in the postal business. They also show the flexibility of a hybrid Customs and postal system right from the beginning of its establishment, and tell a much more complicated history about how China went about setting up modern bureaucratic systems in the late Qing period—localization in action, within the overall context of globalization.
Conflicts of interest over the postal trial
Unfortunately, just as the incident in Shandong was being resolved and an improved courier system was being put in place, more trouble—scandal, even—was caused by the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency, and once again, Detring and the Customs Service-run trial became the focus of tension.
Wu Huan, previously referred to above, was the person who proposed setting up the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency in different locations.Footnote 76 He was consistently enthusiastic about building contacts and gathering information in the northern treaty ports for such an operation.Footnote 77 His involvement provides further evidence of the ambiguity of the nature of the business between the Tianjin Customs and the Chinese- operated Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency.
Besides the northern ports, Wu went to Zhenjiang and set up a branch there, too, in a large building rented by the Zhenjiang Customs House. A married Customs tidewaiter lived in the upper part of the building and the lower part was divided into two offices: one for the tidewaiter to sort foreign mail, and the other for the use of the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency. A Chinese assistant employed by Wu Huan worked there during the winter season. For the rest of the year, the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency's office and the furniture were looked after by a Custom's watchman.Footnote 78 Unlike the satisfactory performance of the Beijing branch, however, this Zhenjiang branch was not very successful in delivering Chinese mail due—it was reported—to weak horses, so the Customs commissioner had to rely on the couriers of the Superintendent as backup.
Following some serious scandals caused by its members, Detring very soon realized that the arrangement with the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency was not such a good one after all. In one case, one of its employees in Niuzhuang was reported to have appropriated funds provided by Tianjin Customs for his personal use, and Detring wanted to hold Wu Huan responsible.Footnote 79 A few days later, a similar situation was discovered in the branch in Tianjin. Without waiting for Wu Huan's explanation, Detring immediately broke from the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency altogether, and ordered his couriers to cease carrying Chinese mail made up by the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency.Footnote 80
To repair the damage caused by its connection with the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency, Detring decided to set up Chinese Maritime Customs Service-run postal offices in all the treaty ports to collect and deliver Chinese mail. He came up with a good Chinese name in order to differentiate it from the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency. The new office was called ‘the Customs Post Office’(Hai Kwan Po-ssu-ta Shu Hsin Kwan), which not only managed to catch the pronunciation of the English word ‘post’, but also vividly expressed in Chinese an image of how mounted Customs couriers would deliver mail with great speed.Footnote 81
Although Detring tried to deal with the issue of the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency by terminating the relationship and establishing new offices attached to the customs houses of treaty ports before he took his leave and went back to Europe in the spring of that year,Footnote 82 the problem remained unresolved. In fact, it got worse. Wu Huan continued to use the name of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service to collect funds from people to set up more Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency branches in the Yangtze River area. He claimed the project was supported by Hart and various important people, claims that were reported in Shenbao.Footnote 83
In Detring's absence, Hart, angered by this news, asked H.E. Hobson, acting commissioner of Tianjin Port, to take strong action.Footnote 84 Hart himself also started to seek a better solution for the transport and delivery of Chinese mail. His concerns were natural enough, but we should remember that in the wider Chinese community at this stage, the reality was that ordinary people almost never used or had even heard of the postal service provided by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. For example, in the case of Ningbo, the deputy commissioner in charge, J. Mackey, stated, ‘This branch, I may add, does not seem to have thriven, judging by the languid sale of stamps, and has never apparently commanded the confidence of the Native public who are probably quite contented with the accommodation afforded by the various Chinese post offices which have been established here for a long time past.’ Judging from the sale of the stamps, it was always foreign customers, such as merchants, missionaries, and pilots, who used postal service, ‘never… Chinese, who seem unable to appreciate them’. Footnote 85
Even four years after the establishment of the winter postal trial, Chinese people were still not used to this service, and preferred to keep faith with the local letter hongs. Hart was reconciled to this reality, and after the troubles caused by the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency, a practical solution was arrived at: to simply set up an English-style letter box in which the general public could deposit their stamped letters. Customs Post letter boxes were to be installed at the Customs House to be accessible daily from 7 am to 7 pm (and on Sundays from 11 am to 5 pm); the postal officer was to attend daily and be available for people who wanted special receipts.Footnote 86 With very few exceptions, all the mail should be prepaid.Footnote 87 As only a few Chinese letters were deposited in the letter boxes of each Customs House, these were merely assigned to one of the ordinary office porters for delivery, until such time as the number increased to a sufficient quantity to make it worthwhile to recruit postal clerks or officers.
However, it was not that Hart disagreed with Detring's sentiment that Chinese firms should be involved in the postal system; rather, that he realized that the issue was one of maturity. The difference between the two men was simply that Hart believed that the right moment had not yet arrived to ask Chinese letter hongs to work with the Customs Service. Following the problems in Shandong, and the scandals caused by the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency, Hart made it clear he was not pleased with Detring's approach. This was compounded by Detring's actions in issuing stamps without properly consulting his colleagues in the Inspectorate General during Hart's absence. Hart told Detring to change the way he worked; in the future, Detring should not make decisions without first gaining the inspector general's approval.Footnote 88
A whiff of the politics of faraway Europe was at play: in the background, Victorian Britain and Bismarck's rapidly industrializing Germany increasingly found themselves rivals on the global stage. Hart detected the German-born Detring's influence in Li Hongzhang's apparent shift in preference from Britain to Germany, and felt threatened, even patronized, by Li and Detring's increasingly close relationship. Hart wrote to Campbell that he expected that any day the Qing administration would appoint Detring ‘Director General of Posts and Telegraphs’.Footnote 89 In the event, such a position was not created until 1906 when Detring had long departed the Customs Service.
For all the personal issues between Detring and Hart, the end goal was clear, at least in Hart's mind. Hart showed a steely determination to set up a British-style modern postal service, copying working procedures, stamps, even the letter boxes of the Victorian postal service back in Britain. Indeed, despite the warning from his local commissioner in Ningbo that ‘prepayment of postage is altogether alien to Chinese ideas’,Footnote 90 Hart did not back away from this principle.
While Hart was cleaning up the mess caused by the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency, Detring was on leave, but he soon returned and became engaged on behalf of Li Hongzhang in the peace negotiations following the Sino-French War in Canton. This caused Hart even more concern and on more than one occasion he expressed his anxiety over the security of his own position in the Customs Service. In one letter he said to Campbell that soon Detring would replace him and become the inspector general;Footnote 91 in the next letter he wondered whether Detring was ‘playing Bismarck's game to make trouble out here’.Footnote 92 After expressing these apprehensions, Hart comforted himself by saying he was glad China had found a use for Detring as he could not do everything himself, and he was happy to see that ‘his’ man, namely Detring, could be useful for China.Footnote 93
Detring was reappointed commissioner of Tianjin Port in October 1884. Hart wrote that this was not his own wish, but for many reasons, it was the right thing to do.Footnote 94 Prior to this, in a letter to the Liberal MP Stuart Rendel, Hart explained to his long-time friend why he had to keep Detring in the Customs Service. Detring was ‘liked by Li Hung Chang. Sufficiently loyal to myself and to China, Detring has done first-class work at Tientsin, but very naturally his presence there has furthered German interests, and to-day we see German military men serving under Li, Germany supplying arms and ironclads, and Germans competing on the “less expensive” principle for naval appointments. Everybody made much of Detring.’Footnote 95 Detring resumed his postal work, but due either to a larger environment that did not allow him to do much, apart from maintaining the existing structure of the overland routes, or through his own decision to devote his attention to other business, the organization of the winter postal routes stayed more or less unchanged until the inauguration of the nationalized postal service in 1896.
Conclusion
With an extra push from Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), superintendent of trade for the northern ocean and viceroy of Huguang, the long-awaited edict finally arrived in March 1896 to formally set up an Imperial Post Office for all of China, and Hart was made its inspector.Footnote 96
Detring was openly thanked by Hart for his efforts in establishing the post office and courier service. Although there were many bumps in the road towards the achievement of this goal, and although Detring's difficulties over the Shandong incident and the Chinese-Foreign Postal Agency had not yet been completely forgotten, Hart reflected that the delayed nationalization of the postal service had been the best outcome after all. If the nationalization of the postal service had been included in the Chefoo Convention, the Chinese might have felt resentful over losing their postal rights to foreign powers. The long delay might ultimately have resulted in some good effects, as Hart wrote: ‘Some compensation may perhaps be found in the thought that the offspring of Native appreciation will be a healthier national growth and more generally welcome than the issue of a distasteful negotiation.’Footnote 97
Of course, Hart's reference to the idea of ‘national growth’ now reads somewhat ironically, as the Qing administration was well on its way towards its demise. Indeed, by this point the very meaning of ‘nation’ had become rather ambiguous in China, and was being intensively questioned, investigated, and reinterpreted by intellectuals and political agitators. The end of an old order, which culminated in the nationalization of the Chinese Postal Service, was therefore yet another milestone marking the end of an era, a harbinger of the demise of the Manchu-led empire and an expression of a new type of national consciousness. It was a historical rupture rather than another stage in the steady march of progress.
The Customs Service started to deliver mail for foreign communities in the northern treaty ports in 1865, and a Chinese Post Office was set up in 1896. This 30-year period mostly overlapped with the ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’. In the negotiations over the Chefoo Convention, the idea of the winter postal trial received only half-hearted support from the Qing court, and even after its establishment, the central government was still extremely reserved in its support.Footnote 98
The mail detention in Shandong Province served to expose further political problems between the provinces and the centre, which were ultimately only settled by wrestling between the powers at high-ranking levels of central and local government. In the dying days of the Qing empire, voices from the provinces could longer be ignored or dismissed, and significant compromises were required by the central government.
Aside from the political conflicts at high levels, there were also conflicts at lower levels around vested local interests. In order to initiate the postal trial, Detring had to rely on Tianjin locals, including Hu Yongan, Tong Zaitian, and others, to carry mail. As Detring admitted, he also had to rely on his Chinese advisers to collect information and make decisions.
Detring's experience also exposes the fact that the Chinese letter hongs built up significant influence through their employment of couriers, their control of inns and stopping points, and their financial strength. They were strongly associated with the traditional banks, local gentry, and merchants, and it is not surprising that, to a large extent, they formed an untouchable web whose members were able to secure a protected position for their interests for an extended period of time. Even after the establishment of the Imperial Post Office, Hart had to rely on the existing letter hongs to transmit mail inland, and allowed the postage rates to be fixed by Chinese firms.
In short, the story of the experimental overland winter postal routes from 1878 not only illuminates the origins of the modern Chinese postal service, but also reveals much about the political and cultural conditions in China in the second half of the nineteenth century. Much of that intriguing story remains to be told.
