The Development Of Economy And The Postal Delivery System Of The Ming Dynasty

The postal delivery system is an important ancient communication and traffic system in our country, which is always in the attention of government, not except for the Ming Dynasty. The government of the Ming Dynasty established a set of very tight postal delivery organization and management system on the basis of the former experience. They not only set up posthouses, transport offices and urgent-deliver offices throughout the country, but also opened up a lot of post roads and renovated many major post roads, thus a huge postal road network came into being. This paper is mainly concerned on the positive influence of postal delivery system on the social and economic development of the Ming Dynasty through the following four aspects: the construction of post road network and the influence of merchandise's circulation, the relation between the post road traffic and the development of towns, the development of the postal delivery and the border regions, the formation and development of the post road and regional markets. Meanwhile this paper also points out the negative influence on economic development resulting from the heavy forced labor of the postal delivery. However, this negative influence does not take a leading position compared with the positive one. This paper with extensive information aims at analyzing comprehensively the relationship between the postal delivery system and economic development of the Ming Dynasty, and revealing the postal delivery system's influence on the economic development of the Ming Dynasty, in order to make up the gap in the postal delivery system research of the Ming Dynasty and widen the field of the postal delivery system research of the Ming Dynasty.