1 · POSITION
Organised accommodation in ancient China began as a function of the state: networks of yi, post stations, that received officials, envoys, documents and horses. The register calls this institutional road hospitality rather than the first hotel — a distinction the trade press often collapses — and the best evidence of how it worked comes from one Han station in the desert at Dunhuang. [1, 2]
2 · XUANQUAN
The Xuanquan posthouse operated more than two thousand years ago on the road west through Dunhuang. A local survey found it in 1987; it was excavated between 1990 and 1992 and gave up more than seventy thousand objects — slips of bamboo and wood, silk books, paper, crops, farming tools and the bones of the station’s animals. It was declared a national key site in 2001 and inscribed with the Silk Roads corridor in 2014. [1, 2]
3 · THE BILL FOR A KING
The slips are the station’s own accounts. They record the reception of the king of Yutian on his way to Chang’an with a delegation of up to 1,074 guests, and an itemised bill for the envoy Chang Hui, who stopped there in 65 BC. A station that keeps the bill for feeding a king’s retinue is a station whose business was receiving people. [1]
4 · STATE, NOT TRADE
The yi served those travelling on the state’s business. The merchant on the same road found his bed elsewhere — in the caravanserais and oasis towns the register files under their own codes. The same division appears in the register’s other post systems: the yam of the Mongol inheritance, the Korean yeok, the Persian royal road. [2]
5 · ⚑ CANDOUR
⚑ Only one station is described from sources here; the size of the yi network in any dynasty is not given by the sources read. Xuanquan’s founding and closing dates are not stated; it is described only as more than two thousand years old. The reception of Yutian’s king is reported without a year in the source. [1–2]
Sources & Further Reading
Sources checked 22 October 2026.