Weipin Tsai, "The Making of China's Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation" (Harvard UP, 2024)

How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system

come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire?

In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai

takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of

China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution

was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it

took. In doing so, Tsai situates the post office within the Qing’s

broader efforts to modernize, showing how its development intersected

with political maneuvering, imperial pressures, and changing ideas about

the nature of the state.

The Making of China’s Post Office examines both the

high-level decisions and the ground-level operations that shaped the