The Postal Route Network in the Qing Dynasty

China’s Postal Route

In the pre-modern period, postal routes played a key role in the proliferation of a successful administration in China, whereby postal routes represented an ‘administrative traffic system’ to provide communication between the provincial capitals and the imperial court in Beijing. According to Fan (1993), “the postal routes were constructed of granite and were built wide enough to accommodate two carts travelling in opposite directions”. The postal highway system during the Qing Dynasty mainly served for official travel, postal dispatch, and military actions (e.g. troop and military grain movement) with its maintenance allocated directly by the central government, although during the entire Qing (1644-1911), large-scale construction and maintenance of the postal routes was rare. In peaceful period, the private use of the postal routes by long-distance merchants became more and more prevalent. Information about these trade routes is provided in several route books and merchant manuals written during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Comparing these trade routes with postal routes, Fan (1993, p36) concludes that “these trade routes were merely transformed from existing administrative routes… [and] the commercial traffic network hardly extended beyond the pre-existing administrative traffic network”.

In 1907 the Qing Dynasty administration produced the China Postal Almanac, which contains maps of the primary postal routes, railroads and telegraph lines in each province. These maps were produced by Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs in Shanghai, which was under the control of the

British-run Chinese Imperial Customs, which suggests that their quality follows the standard of contemporary Western cartography. According to Cai (2005), this Postal Almanac was the first set of detailed postal route maps in China. As the postal route system remained largely unchanged since the establishment of the Ming Dynasty in 1368 (Fan, 1993), the 1907 postal network can be used to measure 18thcentury trade routes. Tsai (2013) further confirms that the creation of the Great Qing Imperial Post Office in 1896 mostly based on the historical infrastructural post network.

In most empirical research on market integration and trade cost, the direct distance between two locations is used to measure distance. This measurement imposes the assumption that the real trade route follows the shortest bilateral direct distance. Quite apparently, this is not true in reality, especially in the pre-modern era using primitive transportation technology. Thus in practice the true trade route follows the topographical distribution of the land (e.g. valleys or navigable rivers), especially for heavy commodities such as grains. In this case, postal distance is a better measurement than direct distance to capture the trade cost.

Data Construction

To capture the impact of trade cost on the transportable route, I digitize the postal route network from these archival maps to construct my variable of “effective” trade route distance within and between prefectures. The postal route computations are based on the historical point and polygon GIS layers for provinces, prefectures and counties in China in 1820 provided by the CHGIS project.

Figure 3.4 shows the digitization process of one Fujian Province as an illustration. In the original archival map in Figure 3.4(a), two administrative units (e.g. prefectures, counties or towns) are connected by a straight line if both of them have access to the same postal route. In Figure 3.4(b), every prefecture (county) point represents the centre point of the polygon of each prefecture (county). I digitize this postal network at the county level, which means I digitize all the postal lines from Figure 3.4(a) to 3.4(b) between any two prefectures or county points, and ignore postal routes going through town points (lower administrative unit than county). In Figure 3.4(b), I draw the green linear lines between any pair (i.e. prefecture to prefecture, county to county or prefecture to county) of the postal network. I digitize these provincial maps one by one adopting the same geo-spatial coordinate system and then connect all the province postal networks together to create a single national postal network. I use the longitude and latitude of the prefecture points to calculate the shortest postal route distance between each prefecture-point pair as a proxy for their bilateral trade route distances. Presented in Figure 3.5, the national postal network thus provides a unique basis for spatial analysis of China’s historical transport infrastructure and its impact on trade in the 18th century. If two prefectures are further apart, it is more likely for their postal route distance to be larger than their linear distance as it is more likely for the transportable route needing to bypass mountains, rivers and valleys. Figure 3.6 compares the bilateral postal route distance and linear distance measures, which shows that postal distance is generally longer than linear distance and this gap increases with line distance. The pattern coincides with our prediction that the bias of direct distance from the real trade distance would be larger if two prefectures are

farer apart. In the rest of this thesis, I use the term ‘distance’ to refer to the postal route distance unique to this thesis

Figure 3.4 Postal Route Archive Map and its Digitization GIS Map

(Example of Fujian Province)

(a) Original Archive (b) Digitized Map

Archive Map Source: China Postal Almanac (1907)

Figure 3.5 Postal Network in China (1907)

Archive Map Source: China Postal Almanac (1907)

Figure 3.6 Postal Distance and Linear Distance