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

New Books in History · Jun 3, 2026 · 1h 1m

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…