Shi Xiaolin/Wen

In the Ming Dynasty, Gu Qiyuan recorded in his book "Guest Words" the proverb "A couple of firewood and rice, friends of wine and meat, and relatives in a box". In Guan Hanqing's "The Single Knife Meeting", Lu Su's line "Guan Yunchang is my friend who drinks and eats, and I sent him with both hands to bring you to Jingzhou" took root in Chinese. When drunk and hot in the ears, they call each other brothers, but after the banquet ends, they become strangers - for thousands of years, the meaning of "wine and meat friends" has always been utilitarian and indifferent.

The daring to title an academic work as "Wine and Meat Friends" is itself a bold brand operation. Dr. Hua Tengda, an economics PhD, achieved instant breakthroughs in numerous academic works with his new work "Wine and Meat Friends: Carnival, Interest, and Betrayal on the Great Ming Post Road".

Why are these four words so captivating? The "wine and meat friends" depicted by Guan Hanqing are synonymous with betrayal, while those depicted by Hua Tengda have become the cutting edge of institutional analysis. A thousand years have passed, and common slang has been requisitioned by economics PhDs, completing its elevation to academic symbols.

Su Shi's "Dongpo Zhilin" states: "Although we are old and poor, our principles run through our hearts and hearts, loyalty and righteousness fill our bones, and we need to laugh and laugh until death. If we see our servants in poverty and hardship, we will meet you. This is truly the interest of wine and meat friends." Hua Tengda's "Wine and Meat Friends" continues this meaning: officials, couriers, merchants, and nobles on the post road are a true community of interests during the period of institutional dividends; After the incentive structure is distorted and the system collapses, 'drinking and meat friends' become synonymous with betrayal.

Hua Tengda, a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Frankfurt in Germany and a Bachelor of Engineering Management from Tongji University, is a visiting scholar at the East Asian Institute of the University of California, Berkeley. He currently teaches at the School of Economics and Management of Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, and his main research areas are fiscal systems and fiscal history in both the East and the West. Triple academic backgrounds converge: economics training in Frankfurt, global history perspective in Berkeley, and engineering management background in Tongji. Previously, Chinese monographs such as "Where did the money of the Ming Dynasty go" and "The Gateway of the Great Divergence", English monographs such as "Merchants, Market, and Monarchy", German monographs such as "Handel im Chinesischen Imperium der Fr ü hen Neuzeit: Commercial Undercurrents of the Early Modern Chinese Empire", and translated works such as "The Eye of Heaven in the Forbidden City", "Vienna", and "The Tea Industry War" have been published. Academic output in Chinese, English, and German enables it to build bridges between different academic traditions.

Huatengda | Shanghai Far East Publishing House, July 2026

In Huatengda's academic map, "Where Did Ming Dynasty Money Go?" examines fields such as state-owned monopoly, commercial tax, and foreign trade; The Gateway to the Great Divergence "expands the perspective to important figures in global history of the 16th century. Friends of Wine and Meat "delves into the meso level of" logistics ", linking fiscal systems, bureaucratic behavior, and geographic space into an organic whole. The three works jointly question: Why has traditional Chinese state governance made numerous innovations in institutional design but repeatedly failed in implementation?

The novel "Wine and Meat Friends" revolves around the historical evolution logic of "institutional construction and operation - release of institutional dividends - institutional decay and collapse", with the Ming Dynasty postal system as the core thread.

The first stage: institutional construction and operation. On the basis of the Yuan Dynasty, Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty established three types of institutions: post stations, delivery offices, and emergency delivery shops, with the functions of "conveying government orders, delivering envoys, reporting military information by air, and transporting military supplies". The author points out from the perspective of new institutional economics that the core governance challenge of agricultural empires lies in reducing transaction costs caused by information asymmetry, lagging material allocation, and lengthy agency chains. The establishment of the relay system is essentially an institutional arrangement to reduce the transaction costs of national governance. The book extensively examines the distribution pattern of materials between the north and south during the Yongle period, and uses financial data to demonstrate that the administrative efficiency of the Ming Empire reached its peak in the pre industrial era during its heyday.

Phase 2: Ecological and Operational Status of Post Roads. Huatengda reconstructed the economic landscape along the post road through local chronicles and memorial documents: merchants trafficking smuggled goods, scholars rushing to take exams to serve, and the army transporting food and supplies. The examination of the low-level official group of "post officials" in the book is particularly detailed - they are lowly and have heavy responsibilities, receiving officials, managing post soldiers, and accounting for accounts, with one person in charge. Systematically sort out the diverse sources of post station funds using fiscal methods, including central appropriations, local assessments, corv é e labor discounts, and commercial tax supplements. The principle of "not providing postal services for non military important matters" in the early Ming Dynasty was still effective during this period.

The third stage: institutional decay and collapse. North reveals that institutional change has "path dependence" - once it reaches a certain track, it will lock in direction under a self reinforcing mechanism. The post transmission of the Ming Dynasty, from the creation of Hongwu Grass and the expansion of Yongle, to the corruption and collapse in the middle and late periods, is precisely a standard sample of institutional decay. Olson's "collective action logic" reveals the "free riding" dilemma: rational individuals tend to sit back and enjoy the benefits rather than actively maintaining public resources. In the postal system, the central government pursues efficiency and affordability, local governments pursue convenience and autonomy, postal workers crave reasonable rewards, and the powerful strive to occupy for free - after incentive incompatibility became the norm, the system transformed from a governance tool to a goal that all parties competed to seize.

The book's tracking of the evolution of the "Kanhe" system (station use vouchers) is particularly fascinating. This system design, which originally intended to regulate the use of post roads, was bypassed by the powerful with their privileges and forged by officials using their power in practice, ultimately becoming a mere formality. The postal delivery system in the early Ming Dynasty could no longer keep up with the needs of political and economic development in the middle and later periods of the Ming Dynasty, and "restrictions on taking postal services" became a mere formality. The 'wine and meat friends' along the post road have evolved from a community of shared interests to zero sum players who compete with each other.

Huatengda pointed out that betrayal is not an accidental fall of human nature, but an inevitable product of the systematic distortion of incentive structures. Confucius said, "A gentleman is compared to righteousness, and a petty person is compared to profit." However, in a distorted system of incentives, even a gentleman can be forced to become a petty person - behind the moral collapse, the first is the collapse of the system.

Emperor Chongzhen abolished post stations, saving tens of thousands of taels of silver. Unemployed postal worker Li Zicheng ultimately overthrew the Ming Dynasty. Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian: Biographies of Commodity Colonization" states: "The world is bustling with prosperity, all for the sake of profit; the world is bustling with turmoil, all for the sake of profit." When the post road, which was the imperial route of "profit coming and going," was cut off, the lifeline of the empire was also cut off.

The book 'Friends of Wine and Meat' focuses on a global historical perspective on a proposition: Does a country's ability to plan, construct, and maintain infrastructure constitute a key variable in the 'Great Divergence' between the East and the West? The rise of modern nation states in Western Europe was accompanied by the systematic upgrading of post roads and canals; After its early glory, the Ming Dynasty postal service fell into institutional corruption and financial exhaustion. As the lifeline of the empire's material circulation, once blocked, any grand plans or strategies become empty talk. Fukuyama's discourse on "national construction" can be found here as an Eastern case: excellent institutional design is only the starting point, and sustained institutional maintenance and self correction ability are the key to success or failure.

(Author Shi Xiaolin)