The Yam

1 · POSITION

The yam was the relay system of the Mongol empire: stations about a day’s ride apart where a rider on the khan’s business was owed a fresh horse, food and shelter. In Russia it outlived the empire, and the words survive — the yamshchik, the coachman who drove the post, and the Yamskaya sloboda, the coachmen’s quarter of a town. The register holds it as hospitality owed by law rather than sold by trade. [1, 2]

2 · THE KHAN’S ROAD

Genghis Khan set up the relay for armies that moved fast; the Secret History of the Mongols credits his son Ögedei, who reigned from 1229 to 1241, with founding it as a system. It is said to have drawn on the Chinese yi stations through Uighur and Khitan advisers. Stations stood some twenty to forty miles apart — an average day on horseback. [1, 2]

3 · THE PAIZA

A rider carried a paiza, an engraved tablet that marked him as the khan’s messenger and entitled him to be supplied: gold for the highest, silver for officials, iron for couriers. Marco Polo described the tablet of gold on which it was written that its bearer be given everything he needed, and counted more than ten thousand station buildings and three hundred thousand horses. [1, 2]

4 · THE RUSSIAN YAM

When the Golden Horde broke up in the fifteenth century, Muscovy kept the service and gave it an office. The Yamskoy prikaz was established in 1516 under Vasily III, usually headed by a boyar; it was abolished in 1711, restored in 1720, and on 8 July 1723 renamed the Yamskaya kantselyariya. It ran Russia’s regular post and official travel from the sixteenth century into the eighteenth. The coachmen who drove it, the yamshchiki, were state servants who carried the post, officials and government freight, and settled in the yamskaya slobody of the towns; their trade lasted until the railways spread. [1, 2, 3]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ Checked on 22 October 2026. No source read counts the yams or dates an abolition to 1841; the Yamskoy prikaz was founded in 1516 and renamed in 1723, and the yam post ran until the railways. The count of three hundred is removed from the note. Station spacing is given as fourteen to forty miles by one source and twenty to forty by another. [1–4]