Re-shaping the Imagined Community: Postal Maps and the Making of National Space for Young China (peer-reviewed)

Against the background of the contemporary popular discourse of national
autonomy after the First World War, this chapter asks how the making of postal
maps helped to construct a national space for Young China. To this end, the issues
will be examined across multiple aspects. First, the chapter will explore the making
of the postal maps and the fame attached to these maps in the sense of projecting
a unified China, from the late Qing to the early Republican era. Next, by
focusing on two cases in Lanzhou, the chapter will address how the Post Office
corrected its own mistakes, both regarding representations on its maps and behind
the scenes with regard to how postal routes were surveyed and established.
The chapter will finally look at how, having been highly regarded for decades as
authoritative in defining national space, the reputation of the postal maps was
challenged over a border dispute with Burma in 1934. The impact of “mistakes”
made on this matter was significant, as at this time the postal maps, available for
purchase and prominently used by key administrative offices of both central and
local governments, served an important purpose as an accessible and generally
uncontested expression of imagined national space.