Institutional Arrangements for Postal Communications in Middle Period China: Ideals and Realities

Government officials in middle period China wrote regularly to each other and to their family members. How did they get their letters delivered? My paper examines the regulations for postal communications and the actual realities in enforcing such regulations, especially during the eleventh to twelfth century in the Song dynasty. I highlight the problems that the imperial government encountered in maintaining reliable and prompt delivery of official documents, especially the appropriation of the official postal system by government officials for delivering “private” letters, namely, letters for family members. Apart from the inefficiency of document delivery there were other problems. For instance, the policy of allowing personal letters in official postal delivery (si shu fu di 私書附遞) created loopholes in guaranteeing the confidentiality of imperial orders. In the study, I argue that once the imperial state made concessions to the postal system’s users by loosening regulations in the early Song, there was no longer any solution for reducing the tension between using the postal system for official communication and taking advantage of it for personal epistolary exchanges. My paper also explores the answers to related historical questions such as: Why did the government allow private correspondence in a postal system set up for the transmission of official documents? How did the imperial government react to the misappropriation of its communication infrastructure, and why? What does this tell us about the Song state’s approaches to regulating bureaucratic communication channels and its ramifications? In order to investigate these issues I not only examine government regulations from the Song, but also try to reconstruct how and when scholar officials sent letters with the epistolary writings or records that describe letter writing activities in their collected writings and travel diaries. Therefore, this paper is not only a study in policy failure that revisits the research by scholars such as Peter J. Golas and Cao Jiaqi; it also tries to establish links between the study of government institutions for postal communications and research on middle period Chinese letter writing practices. It extends my doctoral research on such letter writing practices to the institutional environment that enables such epistolary communication in middle period China.