The year after Qin unified the Six Kingdoms, Ying, a courier in Ba and Shu, discovered that torrential rain had washed away the plank road. Official documents would now take sixty days to reach their destination by a detour. To save the people in an epidemic-stricken area, he dared to use a perilous trail frequented by Qiang hunters and relay messages by carrier pigeon, cutting delivery time to nine days. But he was imprisoned for “recklessly altering the courier regulations.” Three years after his release, he discovered that the military had stolen his method, and that merchants were using the courier roads to smuggle iron goods. With his body broken, Ying retraced the courier route and deliberately exposed its vulnerabilities to wandering warriors from the Six Kingdoms, igniting tensions between the Qin court and the local authorities. In the end, the improved courier routes were adopted nationwide, while his name vanished into worm-eaten holes in bamboo slips. Only one carrier pigeon he had raised continued to fly back each year to the ruins of the old post station.
