Reflections | From bronze tokens to ‘vaccine passports’: a history of Chinese travel documents
- Even in pre-imperial China, when travel was far from common, documents were required for those who crossed internal and international borders
- Buddhist monk Xuanzang, immortalised in the novel Journey to the West, traversed and exited China illegally without documentation
Before the modern era, when international travel was prohibitive because of distance, inconvenient transport and expense, most people did not travel abroad. Hence, papers that identified the bearer’s identity and nationality were not common. That said, people who had to cross internal and international borders for official, mercantile and other purposes required some form of official documentation.
In pre-imperial China, when the country was divided by the Zhou dynasty (1046-256BC) into feudal domains, people who travelled from one state to another, or even between locations within the same state, had to prove their identities at checkpoints using various tokens issued by state governments. In the beginning, these were made of jadeite and bronze, but as more officials, merchants and couriers travelled longer distances, they were replaced with wooden or bamboo ones.
In 298BC, when Lord Mengchang was fleeing the state of Qin, whose king wanted to kill him, the nobleman got past the guards at the checkpoint by altering the name on his identification token. This was one of China’s earliest documented forms of passport.
By the Tang dynasty (AD618-907), the cosmopolitan nature of the Chinese empire necessitated a more comprehensive system to manage people going in and out of the country. To ensure the proper conduct of trade, prevent non-payment of excises and safeguard national security, all travellers had to bear official papers that identified them, the places they had visited and their purpose of visit.