The postal relay system in ancient China served as the official method of communication and transportation and included both civil and military delivery. In the Ming dynasty, the postal relay system created a new special corvée labour status. Even though the majority of the work was assigned to civilian households, there remained a special class of workers, called Relay Postal Personnel (zhanjun). This group worked at sites that were designated military postal stations. The postal personnel were responsible for the delivery of official documents and managed the distribution of supplies—similar to that of civilian households—yet their household registration fell under the jurisdiction of military households and fell under the government administration which subordinated them under the military garrison system—the Commander-in-Chief of the Military Command—the Five Chief Military Commissions. The emergence of this phenomenon was closely related to the adjustments made in the early Ming dynasty to the corvée labour system inherited from the Yuan Dynasty. After the garrison guards fled their posts, and the emergence of the tax system of ‘splitting the silver taels’ was instituted at the civilian postal stations, every provincial governor from the mid-Jiajing era onward began to transfer funds from military budgets and the government treasury to provide assistance to the military stations. At the same time, military postal stations experienced a shortage of hired labor. These reforms shored up the the courier system in border areas and extended the spirit of the ‘Single-whip Method’ of levying taxes to the Garrison (weisuo) system, military postal stations, and civilian postal stations which could thus all develop along the same trajectory.
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