Fable
Official post stations on the post road and every place where horses could rest
Along the old official road, a post station was set up every fifty li, built uniformly by the imperial court. A post station had stables, letter boxes, duty sheds, and granaries. Couriers delivering documents and escorting criminals changed horses at post stations. Over time, people along the route stopped distinguishing post stations from rest stops—any courtyard with a stable was called a post station.
Merchants traveling north and south had suffered losses over this several times. They heard locals say there was a post station thirty li ahead, rushed there excitedly, only to find it was just a private carriage and horse inn: it had stables but no mail slot, could rest horses but could not swap official horses, let alone provide the seals and passes for escorting criminals. The merchants had to turn back and walk another ten li to find the real post station.
Later the imperial court opened a new branch road and built a new-style post station on it, called Jingyuan Station. Jingyuan Station had three things more than an ordinary post station: a nighttime suspended-lamp signal tower, a wooden turntable that allowed self-service horse registration, and a brick room specifically for storing postal documents. After a year of operation, Jingyuan Station had almost zero lost items and zero delays, and the three prefectures along the route all requested additional stations.
When the Ministry of Revenue approval came down, several county postal officials wrote the approval as building one Jingyuan Post Station each in every county—they treated Jingyuan Post Station as another name for a post station. Only when the accounts were reported did people learn that they had built neither signal towers nor brick document rooms, and had only renovated the main gates to the old post station standard. They said: after all, Jingyuan Post Station is also a post station.
The official was furious and pounded the table, then sent people down with the construction drawings for Jingyuan Station to check them item by item. The drawings listed nineteen functional requirements in total—signal towers, self-service turntables, document brick houses, flood-prevention canals, day-and-night shift rules—and the old station met only seven of them. The twelve missing items were exactly the key to Jingyuan Station avoiding lost items and delays.
So the court revised the post-road rules: from then on, post stations would not be selected by name, but checked item by item against nineteen functional requirements. The number met determined the number of post stars. Jingyuan Post was five-star; some old post stations were three-star and some four-star, but no one mixed them up in name anymore.
Later, Jingyuan Station added a night-shift rescue mechanism, becoming a six-star station. The new stationmaster's first act upon taking office was to pull out the nineteen-item checklist and ask himself how many stars he was managing. The last line of the checklist read: Don't take one good station you've seen as a universal template for all stations.