This article seeks to expand the history of pre-industrial animal labor beyond the farmyard. Centering on China’s ancient postal system, it approaches a surviving corpus of over 20,000 excavated administrative texts with the aim of recovering human and horse labor at the Xuanquan Postal Station 懸泉置. Integrating psychological and behavioral studies of modern horses with alternate textual readings, the article uses human-authored texts to reconstruct the working conditions and sensory experiences of the site’s postal horses. Doing so attests to the horses being active participants in postal work who were able to modify, disrupt, and create communities in and through their labor. While postal systems may seem to function almost mechanically at a macrolevel, this study reminds us that, on the ground, successful and timely postal work relied on individual equine labor, compliance, and collaboration.
Kelsey Granger (Thu,) studied this question.