Abstract:

In recent 30 years, many scholars have devoted themselves to the research on the history of China’s posts, and have made great achievements which can be roughly divided into three parts: the first is the general research on the history of posts, including a general overview of its development and the elements in it; second, the research on its development in different periods, this is mainly divided into the shaping period, the developing and perfecting period, the full development period, the falling period and the modern transitional period; third, the research on the history of local posts, it involves its development in northeast, northwest, southwest and other areas. After summarizing these research results, we find that although they are widely-related and last a long period, these results still have some limitations, such as imbalance of time-space distribution, lack of relation and comparison, emphasis on description rather than summarization and some details needing to be proven. All of these indicate the necessity of further research. The review of the research on the history of China’s posts will help us to summarize and find shortage. Overall, our study still needs breakthroughs at the aspects of content-expanding, thinking-innovation and so on.

Key words: research on history of posts, postal station, posts