A clerk at a counter in Shanghai, in the winter of 1897, takes your letter, weighs it against a printed table, and hands back a small square of paper printed in red and black. You paste it on the envelope and the letter can travel to any part of the empire. If you want it to travel faster there is a larger square, and a clerk who will want to look at your face. This is the moment at which the Chinese post office stops being an argument between governments and becomes an object you hold between your fingers.
The relay that carried nobody’s letter
The obvious way to explain the founding of China’s national post is to begin with a failure of will. The Qing state built a courier relay system that ran, by one count, for more than two and a half thousand years, and then declined for most of that time to let ordinary people use it. That is the shape of the puzzle. An empire that could shift an army’s despatches across a continent at three hundred li a day somehow could not be persuaded to carry a merchant’s letter from Shanghai to Hankow for a few cents, and went on failing to do so until an edict in 1896.
The relay, in Chinese the yizhan, was a chain of stations, roughly thirty li apart under the Han and sixty li apart under the Ming, strung along the roads between the capital and the provinces. A station was a relay station in the sense that a courier arrived, changed horses, ate, and went on; the name comes from an old gloss that defines the you as a station on the border where documents were handed over. The system was never a postal service in the modern sense. It was a machine for moving documents that the state itself had decided to move. Under the Qin and Han, documents were graded by rank, and a dispatch of a given importance was carried by a specified number of men and horses at a specified speed, with receipt and time entered in a register at each end so that responsibility could be assigned if a packet went missing. That accounting discipline is the ancestor of everything the postal service would later become.
The speed regulations of the Tang are startling when read as a timetable. A fast horse covered six stations a day, or a hundred and eighty li; anything above three hundred li a day was exceptional; the absolute maximum was five hundred. A man on foot managed fifty. Boats were worse going up the Yangtze than down it, at forty to sixty li a day upstream against a hundred and fifty downstream, and the schedules say so. When the rebel general An Lushan rose in the north in 755, the court in the south learned of it six days later, over a distance of three thousand li. A later poet, Du Mu, wrote the relay out as a single image: a rider, red dust, a woman laughing, because the couriers had killed their horses bringing lychees to the emperor’s favourite concubine. The relay was fast, and it was entirely indifferent to you.
Under the Yuan the system was rebuilt and enlarged; Marco Polo, describing it for European readers, put a relay station every twenty-five or thirty miles with no road and no inhabitants in many cases, more than ten thousand stations in all, and around three hundred thousand horses reserved for the use of envoys. Under the Ming the network covered the country with close to two thousand stations, and then decayed. Late Ming officials complained in memorials that the horses were being requisitioned by private travellers, that the station funds were embezzled, that the courier service cost the countryside so much that people were selling their wives and children to meet the levy. An censor in 1622 wrote that beasts and men were fixed in number while the number of demands had increased a hundredfold. The relay had a fiscal problem long before it had a political one.
The Qing inherited about seventeen hundred and eighty stations and kept them, because they worked, and because they were the instrument by which the court governed. In Beijing, outside the eastern gate of the Forbidden City, the Board of War ran the Huanghua station and a separate rapid-report office where memorials were checked, sealed and dispatched. Nothing moved without a warrant: a huo piao, or fire-ticket, naming the destination, the deadline, the sending and receiving offices, checked and registered at every station in turn. Three hundred li a day was ordinary; for urgent business the envelope itself recorded the instruction, four hundred, five hundred, six hundred li, or the same figure again with a word meaning hastened.
And private people were not on the ticket. Documents of a private character — letters, papers, small goods — went out with armed escort firms, whose men were called biao and whose agencies were called escort houses, or with private native post companies that carried letters for a fee outside any official system. One of these, founded in Fujian by a diaspora merchant, was running four bureaus by 1892 and registered itself as a proper company in 1896. The law of supply and demand had produced a private postal industry in a country where the state possessed one of the oldest communications infrastructures on earth and had declined, for two thousand years, to extend it.
The historian Chelsea Zi Wang, writing about the Ming system, treats this as friction rather than failure: the relay was designed for one job and asked to do another, and the cost of conversion fell on the same villages that could least afford it. That is the right frame. The Qing did not fail to build a post office. It had built something else, extremely well, and the arrival of a modern post meant dismantling or reinventing the instrument through which the empire governed itself. The official couplers were not abolished at all until 1912, and then only province by province, with a formal effort in Jiangxi in 1911 that foundered in a jurisdictional dispute with the Board of War. By 1914 the last of them had gone, leaving only traces in Outer Mongolia, Tibet and Qinghai. The standard account of the relay system sets out the station counts and speed schedules for each dynasty in turn, and Wang’s article in Late Imperial China is the most useful modern treatment of the Ming phase.
Stamps in a foreign key
The foreign incursion that produced the national post was not one event but a slow accumulation, and it began with a category mistake. When the treaties of the 1840s opened Chinese ports to foreign trade, the foreign merchants who moved into those ports assumed that the postal arrangements they had at home came with them. They did not, and the gap between assumption and reality is where the whole story sits. Foreign post offices began appearing in Chinese treaty ports from 1844 and multiplied through the 1880s, mostly on the coast, along the Yangtze, and in the far south. In Shanghai, which had its own municipal government under the control of the foreign settlement, a local post of its own was organised in 1865, serving the international city rather than China. A concession — a territory within a Chinese port where foreign residents governed themselves under Chinese sovereignty, with foreign courts, foreign police and, increasingly, foreign utilities — had produced a foreign state in miniature, and it needed its own mail.
The Chinese authorities found the whole business intolerable, and their objection was not commercial but categorical. A foreign post office in a Chinese port was an assertion that a foreign government exercised a public function on Chinese soil, and the distinction mattered more than the service was worth. Ying-wan Cheng’s study of postal communication before the national post is the foundational account of this period, and her chapter on the foreign establishments runs from 1834 to 1896 and shows how consistently the Chinese state treated the foreign offices as an encroachment to be absorbed or expelled rather than a market to be served. Lane Harris’s work on the Shanghai local post makes the same point from the other side: for the British commercial community in Shanghai between 1863 and 1897 the local post was an instrument of informal empire, a piece of municipal infrastructure that happened to be a way of governing a foreign population at the Chinese state’s expense.
The Chinese did not, of course, have nothing at all. In 1865 the Irish inspector general of the Imperial Maritime Customs, Robert Hart, built a mail service for the customs, initially to carry consular correspondence between the treaty ports. It was opened to the public on 1 May 1878, and its stamps are the famous Large Dragons: inscribed CHINA in both Latin letters and Chinese characters, and denominated not in silver but in the candareen, a term imported from the Malay for a weight of about 378 milligrams and used in China as a money unit of one tenth of a dollar. Three values were issued, and each had a colour and a job: a one fen silver stamp in green for printed matter, a three fen stamp in red for ordinary letters, a five fen stamp in orange-yellow for registered mail. All foreign mail initially went through Shanghai; by 1882 there were twelve post offices. It was a real service, run by foreigners, for foreigners, inside a customs department, and it did not solve the problem.
On 20 March 1896 the Guangxu Emperor approved an edict, on the strength of a memorial from the Zongli Yamen, the Qing Board of Foreign Affairs, instructing that the Customs Post be converted into a national service. The edict took effect on 1 January 1897; the Shanghai local post and a private Shanghai post called the Min Xin Chu were closed; and the postal system changed its unit of account from the candareen to cents and dollars. Lane Harris’s recent survey of the period puts it plainly: in 1896 the emperor authorised Hart to create an imperial postal administration, and over the following quarter of a century Hart and his successors worked to make it dominate the market and then to close the foreign offices. The Directorate-General of the post was formally constituted on 20 February 1897, the nineteenth day of the first month of the twenty-third year of the Guangxu reign, and the old customs post offices were renamed into the new service.
The stamps themselves arrived out of order, and the disorder is the reason collectors are arguing about them a century and a quarter later. In January 1896 a censor named Chen Pi had petitioned the emperor to authorise revenue stamps; the proofs went to Hart for approval; the order went to England; and only part of a consignment of three cent revenue stamps was printed, by Waterlow and Sons of London, and shipped. They were held in the Shanghai customs storeroom, unused, and the red was chosen because red was the colour of good fortune. At the inauguration of the postal service in February 1897 the regular stamps, ordered from a lithographic works in Japan and known as the Coiling Dragon issue, had not arrived. So the idle revenue stamps were overprinted — that is, printed on again, on top of the design already there — to carry postal values. Five denominations were made this way: one cent, two cents, four cents, one dollar and five dollars. Collectors call them the Red Revenues, and because they are the fruit of a printer’s error they are among the most sought-after stamps in the world.
The currency question was not incidental to any of this. Expressing postage in cents and dollars was a political act, because the Chinese dollar was silver and the world’s postal accounts were not. The Universal Postal Union settled its international accounts in gold, and a system that denominated in silver cents was permanently awkward to reconcile with every other postal administration on earth; the colours of stamps had to be altered, later, to satisfy Union rules about distinguishing denominations at a glance. The deeper trouble was that a state which had just asserted sovereignty over its own mail was simultaneously announcing, in the denomination printed on its stamps, that its money was not the money of the international system. Wang Chelsea Zi has examined the language politics of exactly this kind of problem in a different department of government, and the parallel with the post is close enough to be suggestive: the currency on the stamp is where administrative convenience and national assertion collide.
The first new stamps went on sale on 16 August 1897. Twelve values, from half a cent to five dollars, inscribed imperial Chinese post, lithographed in Japan. Low values carried a dragon, middle values a carp, the dollar values a wild goose, and the paper carried a yin-yang watermark. The colour was doing work: each value had its own colour, the way beads on an abacus have positions, and the value on the stamp was printed not across the face but inside a small ornamental panel, a cartouche, so that the number could be changed without redrawing the picture. That design logic is exactly what makes an overprint possible. A year later the lithographed Japanese stamps were superseded by similar designs engraved in London, inscribed in a different order, on Chinese-supplied watermarked paper of wildly varying thickness so that the watermark is often invisible on the heavier sheets. Printings from 1899 were unwatermarked, and no use of them is recorded before 1901. The detailed collation of these issues, with their variations, is a book-length subject of its own, and the standard reference remains Ma Ren Chuen’s catalogue of the stamps of China, of which a picture album was published by the China National Philatelic Museum in 1989.
Who actually ran the post
The succession of directors general is where the politics sit, because for most of the first two decades the nominal head and the effective head were not the same person. In 1896 the government resolved to run the post, and Hart was given charge of it in name while a Chinese customs official named Po Li actually managed the business. This was the arrangement the state had chosen for itself: borrow the machine, take the credit. It lasted, in that form, almost nothing.
In 1901 Hart appointed Théophile Piry, a long-serving French customs manager, postal secretary — fulfilling a commitment the Chinese government had made in 1898 to take into account the recommendations of the French government in making appointments. Because the post office remained part of the Customs until 1911, Hart was Piry’s boss, and the two men spent a decade and more circling each other over the romanisation of place names, which sounds trivial and was not. The post office cancelled mail with a date stamp giving the city of origin in Latin letters, and it had to choose a system for spelling Chinese cities. Hart wanted the Wade-Giles forms, the Beijing-based system then standard in English. His postmasters wanted out of writing that task. In 1905 Hart issued a directive telling them not to follow Wade but to submit forms according to accepted or usual local spellings, consulting local missionaries if necessary. In 1906 Piry convened an Imperial Postal Joint-Session Conference at Shanghai, a joint postal and telegraphic gathering, which rejected Wade-Giles and formally adopted the Nanking syllabary instead: existing spellings retained, accents and hyphens dropped so that an address could go down a telegraph wire, and local pronunciation followed in Guangdong and parts of Guangxi and Fujian. Atlases explaining the scheme appeared in 1907, 1919, 1933 and 1936.
Modern scholarship treats the compromise as the point rather than the flaw. Harris observes that what critics call the eccentricity of postal romanisation is its strength, because a system that insists on local pronunciation is a system that recognises local identity as real, which is a considerably more modern posture than a national standard alphabet would have been. It is worth noticing that a postal administration is doing this work at all. Deciding that a city is called one thing rather than another is an act of government, and doing it in Latin letters, for a mail system that crosses borders, is an act of government aimed outward.
The administrative separation of the post from the customs came in 1906, when the Qing created a Ministry of Posts and Communications and put the Directorate-General under it; from that point the postal business was formally independent of the customs. Sheng Xuanhuai, the businessman and negotiator who had spent a decade trying to get Chinese control of the railways, became a vice minister of the new board and was appointed its minister in January 1911. The French knot took longer to untie than the administrative one. The post office had been under French administration almost continuously since Piry’s appointment in 1901, and its French arrangements entangled it both with the French post in China, which ran through the south, and with French Indochina’s own stamp issues. It was finally the Japanese, in 1943, who removed A. M. Chapelain, the last French head of the Chinese post. Patricia Maclachlan’s history of the Japanese postal system from 1871 to 2010 is the fullest available context for how the Japanese state built and used its own post as an instrument of power, and Weipin Tsai’s recent study of the Chinese post’s making treats the same ground from the Chinese side; both are worth reading against each other, because they disagree productively about how much of the modernisation was Chinese.
One famous scandal of this period I can only report with its chain of custody intact and its substance flagged. Philatelic writing carries a persistent story about a set of counterfeits of the 1897 overprints, generally given the names Carter and Cain, and generally described as having been produced in or for Japan in the years immediately after 1897. The story is often told as a neat parable: colonial rivalry, a Western forger, a Japanese buyer, and a scandal that embarrassed both governments. I could not locate it in the scholarly literature on the Chinese post. Cheng’s chapters on the foreign establishments and on the founding of the imperial post office do not mention it, and neither do the accounts of the Red Revenue issue itself. My judgement is that the story is genuine philatelic tradition with a thin and probably unreliable documentary base, and that the detail usually attached to it — who commissioned the forgeries, where they were made, and what diplomatic consequence they had — should be treated as unsettled. It is included here as a specimen of how the postal disputes of the 1890s were remembered rather than as established fact.
The smallest declaration of sovereignty
The 1912 overprints are the single most instructive episode in the whole story, because in them the stamp does the job of a proclamation while pretending to be an ordinary piece of stationery. When the revolution of 1911 disrupted the postal arrangements, the imperial stamps were not withdrawn. They were printed on again. At Fuzhou the overprint declared the post office a provisional neutral ground available to both sides; at Nanjing and at Shanghai it read Republic of China, from top to bottom, four characters running down the face of the stamp. Waterlow and Sons in London made an additional set. And then postmasters all over the country, with no central instruction and no printing press but their own, made their own unofficial overprints using the same four characters. A revolution that could not agree on a government could still agree on a phrase.
Think about what the object was doing. A postage stamp is a receipt. It says: this piece of paper has been paid for, it belongs to the postal administration named on it, and the administration will stand behind the letter’s delivery. Overprint here is not a forgery but a reissue — new characters laid over an old design, which is why philatelists call the process a surcharge when a new value is added and an overprint when an authority is named. The 1912 overprints are the most consequential overprints in Chinese philately precisely because they are the moment when the meaning of the square changed from a price to a claim. And because the claim was contested, the same four characters over the same design exist in dozens of spellings of ink, shade of paper and sloppiness of setting, each one a small monument to a local official improvising sovereignty at a desk in a provincial town.
What followed is the long argument between a republic’s desire to have a new face and the practical fact that nobody wants to throw away usable stamps. Two commemorative sets of twelve went out on 14 December 1912, one showing Sun Yat-sen and one Yuan Shikai; the definitive series known as the junk issue followed on 5 May 1913 and stayed in use into the 1930s, with a junk on the low values, a farmer reaping rice in the middle values and the three-part gateway to the Hall of Classics in Beijing on the dollar values, printed first in London and then in Beijing from 1915. In 1921 a commemorative marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the post office itself and put the president, the premier and the minister of communications on three stamps side by side, which tells you how recently the institution considered itself new.
Then the country came apart, and the stamp followed. The Sun Yat-sen definitives of 1931 and the Martyrs issue of 1932, honouring six dead of the ruling party, were overprinted and re-overprinted repeatedly as authority changed hands in different places. From 1930 the communist authorities were issuing stamps of their own in the mountainous border regions where they held power, in the hills of Jiangxi, along the Hunan-Hubei frontier and in western Fujian; collectors call them the Red Posts, and they are the most direct predecessors of the postal system the People’s Republic later built. Every one of these issues is a claim about how far a government reaches. The martyrs in the name is the honest part: the stamp does not merely assert authority, it memorialises the dead who are supposed to have secured it.
The clearest test of that claim came in Manchuria. Manchukuo issued its first stamps on 26 July 1932, two designs, a pagoda at Liaoyang and a portrait of the Puyi. The inscription read Manchu State Postal Administration; in 1934 it was changed to Manchu Empire Postal Administration, a small edit that announces everything. An orchid crest appeared in 1935 and a design featuring the Sacred White Mountains in 1936, and the commemoratives that followed honoured the state’s own anniversaries, its laws, and Japan — including the 2600th anniversary celebrations of the Japanese Empire in 1940. The last Manchukuo issue came on 2 May 1945, commemorating the tenth anniversary of an edict. A puppet state had produced a complete philatelic programme with its own fauna, flora, monuments and dynastic dead, and when it dissolved, what happened to its stamps was as revealing as anything that happened before. Successor authorities locally handstamped surviving stocks Republic of China; in the far north, the Port Arthur and Dairen postal administration overprinted Manchukuo stamps on and off between 1946 and 1949. A collapsed government left behind a paper archive that its successors could not erase and could not afford to.
Inside China itself the Japanese occupation of 1937 to 1945 produced a stranger arrangement. Chinese stamps were at first used in the occupied territories, which meant that letters in cities under Japanese control carried the insignia of a government that had lost control of them. From 1941 they were overprinted separately for Inner Mongolia, for Guangdong, for North China, for Shanghai and for Nanjing, and in some areas entirely local designs were issued instead. The frank — the mark, whether a stamp or a hand cancellation, that indicates postage paid without a stamp being affixed — became in these years a way of stating which authority was taxing the letter. The Japanese takeover of the Chinese postal administration reached even the nationality of its head, when in 1943 the Japanese removed the Frenchman who had run it.
The emergency overprint
Nothing in the sequence is more legible than the overprints of 1946 to 1949, because there a state ran out of numbers. Inflation had been forcing new values through the 1940s; by 1946 it was out of control, and stocks of stamps, some of them dating from 1931, were being surcharged up to two thousand dollars while a new design, still carrying Sun Yat-sen’s portrait, went up to five thousand. In 1947 a Sun Yat-sen issue decorated with plum blossoms reached fifty thousand dollars, and in 1948 reissues topped out at five million. The famous design of this period is the colourful Sun Yat-sen portrait, and its story is told in the standard survey of Chinese postal history, which is the source for most of the specific dates and values in this section as well.
In 1948 the government adopted a gold yuan standard and surcharged existing stamps from half a cent upward. It was a stopgap of months rather than years, and by early 1949 the surcharging was under way again, still climbing to five million. On 1 May 1949 came the step that tells you everything about the state of the currency: the government printed undenominated stamps, with no value printed on them at all, to be sold at whatever the yuan was worth that day. Then it adopted a silver yuan standard and overprinted yet more stamps, reissuing the Sun Yat-sen design in values from one to five hundred cents. One survives on a revenue stamp, a four cent surcharge on a hundred silver yuan, used for a matter of months in mid-1949. By August the Nationalist government’s last mainland issues were two designs from a pictorial series that was never finished.
Consider what an overprint is when you remove the philatelic pleasure from it. It is a form of accounting. A government that has spent its reserves and lost its revenue prints new numbers onto old paper because the paper is already in every post office in the country and is already trusted. It is an emergency measure, and emergency measures leave the most legible traces, because they are made by people in a hurry in a bad mood with bad ink. A philatelist reads the haste in the spacing and the weight of the type. A historian reads the collapse of a currency in the place where the state’s smallest printed promise met an ordinary person’s envelope.
The People’s Republic did the same thing, from the other side of the collapse, and did it immediately. Communist authorities had been issuing stamps in the areas they controlled from 1930 onwards, in remote border districts, and the unified General Postal Administration grew out of that network in Beijing in 1949. It was a thin thing at first, with roughly one post office for every 370 square kilometres. Regional systems were ordered to stop selling their own issues by 30 June 1950, though the Northeast Liberation Area and the Port Arthur and Dairen administration, working in different currencies, went on using theirs until the end of 1950. The administration surcharged the previous government’s stamps in March and August 1950 and again in May 1951, and pressed leftovers from the northeastern provinces into service in July 1950 and from East China in December 1950. Its own first stamps went out on 8 October 1949: four values showing a lantern and the Gate of Heavenly Peace, commemorating the first session of the Chinese People’s Consultative Political Conference. They also inaugurated a practice that philatelists still use, numbering every commemorative stamp so that the value of the 1950 Dove of Peace can be described as 5.3-2 — the second stamp of three in the fifth issue of China.
The scraps and the millionaire
Stamp collecting in China is usually described as a mass phenomenon, and the reason is visible in the sequence above. For twenty years the currency on the country’s stamps was meaningless, and the only stable information on a stamp was its paper, its ink, its watermark and the shape of its overprint. A generation of collectors grew up reading exactly those things, because the number was the one part that could not be trusted. There is a formal philatelic organisation, and its first national congress was held in 1982; the growth of the hobby since the 1980s and 1990s has turned it into a domestic industry with its own fairs, its own dealers and its own price reporting.
What the Cultural Revolution did to collections was structural rather than incidental. Reduced stamp sales and the withdrawal of issues produced a few genuinely scarce stamps, used or unused, and one of them has become the most quoted object in the subject. An unissued eight fen stamp of 1967 commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Jinggangshan revolutionary base, showing Mao and Lin Biao together on the podium overlooking Tiananmen Square, is known to collectors as Big Blue Sky. It was withdrawn before it was issued, and it survives only as scraps salvaged from the destruction process; of the whole withdrawn set, scraps from a single stamp are known to exist. It is, in other words, a national monument that exists only in the fragments that were too small to be worth destroying. Between 1967 and 1971 the postal service issued nineteen sets totalling eighty stamps, and they became highly collectable immediately after the Revolution ended, which is the general pattern of a scarcity manufactured by politics.
The other great rarity is the Small One Dollar, the earliest of the five Red Revenue overprints of 1897. It was made first, and when complaints came that the overprinted Chinese characters were too small to read, the design was changed, which is the ordinary philatelist’s tragedy: the version people disliked is the version that survives. Only thirty-two are known to exist. The stamp has been called China’s rarest regularly issued stamp, and a single example sold for just under seven million Hong Kong dollars at an auction in Hong Kong in 2013, while another went for 7.22 million yuan in Beijing the same year. Its provenance is the best story in Chinese philately, because it traces the whole argument of this essay in a chain of owners. R. A. de Villard took the block of four directly from the customs where he worked, in the years when the postal administration was still lodged inside the customs department. M. D. Chow bought it from Villard’s widow in 1927 for 3,500 dollars. It was sold to the Shanghai collector Allan Gokson in 1947 for twenty thousand US dollars, and after Gokson’s death the Hong Kong banker and philatelist Lam Manyin bought it from his estate in 1982 for two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. In 2009 a Shanghai real-estate magnate reportedly acquired it from Lam, together with a Large Dragon, for a hundred and twenty million yuan.
So a scrap of a customs storeroom issue of 1897 passed from a customs employee to a widow to a buyer to a businessman to a banker’s estate to a property developer, and each transaction made the same physical object more expensive and less like a piece of mail. The Red Revenues were, as the account in the standard history of the issue puts it, overprinted because a lithographic works in Japan had not delivered the stamps on time. A printing delay in one city became a bureaucratic decision by a foreign customs officer and then an act of the Qing state, and both of those accidents were then frozen into thirty-two pieces of paper. They were not designed to last. They were designed to be pasted on a letter, carried, read once, and thrown into a bin, and the entire purpose of the object was to be forgotten by both the sender and the receiver.
Instead it is the only surviving piece of the machinery. Everything else from the Qing postal administration is gone: the correspondence, the registers, the memoranda, the reasons. What is left is a set of coloured squares, each one asserting that a named authority had the power to fix a price on a letter, and each one still carrying, in its paper and its watermark, the memory of which foreign firm printed it, which country’s lithographic works did the drawing, and which currency the government thought it was. A rare stamp is not a souvenir of the empire; it is a fragment of its account books. The philatelist who holds it is holding a piece of the 1897 budget, and the price on the auction catalogue is the last line of the argument the Chinese state lost in 1949 and then, in a hundred markets across the country, recovered one stamp at a time.
References
- Postage Stamps and Postal History of China — Wikipedia, English-language encyclopedia, section on the Qing and Republic eras
- Red Revenue — Wikipedia, English-language encyclopedia, article on the 1897 overprinted revenue stamps
- Chinese Postal Romanization — Wikipedia, English-language encyclopedia, article on the postal transcription of place names
- Postage Stamps and Postal History of Manchukuo — Wikipedia, English-language encyclopedia, article on the Manchukuo issues
- Candareen — Wikipedia, English-language encyclopedia, article on the weight and currency unit
- Chinese Gold Yuan — Wikipedia, English-language encyclopedia, article on the 1948 currency standard
- Yizhan shi: History of the Courier Relay Stations of China — Chinese Wikipedia, zh-language encyclopedia, station counts and speed regulations by dynasty
- Da long you piao yu Qing dai you shi (A Picture Album of the Large Dragon Stamps and the Postal History of the Qing Dynasty) — China National Philatelic Museum, 1989, ISBN 978-962-07-5077-9
- Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, 1860–1896 — Ying-wan Cheng, Harvard University Asia Center, 1970
- The Establishment of the Imperial Post Office — Ying-wan Cheng, chapter in Postal Communication in China and Its Modernization, 1860–1896, Brill/Harvard University Asia Center
- Stumbling towards Empire: The Shanghai Local Post Office, the Transnational British Community and Informal Empire in China, 1863–97 — Lane J. Harris, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 46 no. 3, pp. 418–445, 2018
- “The Comity of Nations”: The Chinese Post Office, the Universal Postal Union, and the Abolition of the “Alien Post Offices”, 1843–1923 — Lane J. Harris, Monde(s), no. 26, pp. 93–111, 2024
- The People’s Post Office: The History and Politics of the Japanese Postal System, 1871–2010 — Patricia L. Maclachlan, Harvard University Asia Center, 2012
- The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation — Weipin Tsai, Harvard University Asia Center, 2024, ISBN 978-0674295889
- More Haste, Less Speed: Sources of Friction in the Ming Postal System — Chelsea Zi Wang, Late Imperial China, vol. 40 no. 2, pp. 89–140, 2019
