The Making of China's Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation Weipin Tsai. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2024. 450 pp. $75.00 (hbk). ISBN 9780674295889

The Making of China's Post Office is the latest monograph to be authored by one of the team of distinguished scholars who participated in the Chinese Maritime Customs Project led by Robert Bickers and Hans van de Ven in the early 2000s.Like the other excellent monographs that have come out of the Customs Project, Tsai's book seeks to explore the history of the modern Chinese state, the role of foreigners in modern Chinese history, and the process of globalization in China.There is no better institution to study the intersection of these factors in modern Chinese history than the Maritime Customs Service and its "daughter," the Imperial/Chinese Post Office (IPO/CPO).Although the financial contributions of the Customs Service to the growth of the modern Chinese state cannot be denied, the IPO/CPO arguably became the more important institution.At its greatest extent in the mid-Republican period, the Post Office consisted of 72,000 offices, a staff of 40,000 employees, and a network of 400,000 miles of mail routes.It was, by far, the largest civilian branch of the Chinese state.Rather than attempt a comprehensive history of the IPO/CPO from its founding in 1896 to the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, Tsai has wisely chosen to focus on two important issues in its historythe politics of its founding and the logistics of its early expansion.In the first half of the book, Tsai addresses the question of how and why the "enormous, nationwide institution" of the Imperial Post Office came into being in the late 19th century.In chapter one, Tsai delves deeply into Qing imperial politics by situating us in the late 1850s and early 1860s during the end of the Second Opium War and establishment of the Zongli Yamen.This context is important because the leaders of the Zongli Yamen, the Prince of Gong and Wenxiang, immediately assumed oversight of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service and its new inspector general, Sir Robert Hart.In chapter two, Tsai examines the origins of Hart's famous "bystander's view" reform proposal in 1865, in which he first seriously advocated for the establishment of a state-run postal service open to the public.Just at that moment, the Prince of Gong began encountering political troubles, Wenxiang wavered in his support for reform, and rising powerful governors-general like Li Hongzhang, who little favoured the idea of a national postal service run by a foreigner, kept the Court from approving Hart's plans.Chapter three covers the negotiations over the Margary Affair in 1876, when Sir Thomas Francis Wade refused to push the postal idea on Li Hongzhang, but Hart was allowed to experiment with an overland postal service in North China between customs houses.Hart entrusted Gustav Detring, the Tianjin Customs Commissioner, with operating this new Customs Post, a service mostly used by foreigners and often resisted by local Qing officials.In the fourth chapter, Tsai discusses the establishment of Li Hongzhang's wenbao bureaus and Liu Mingquan's Taiwan Post as evidence of the increasing consensus around the need for a national postal service.It was not, however, until the immediate aftermath of