Abstract: Surgical treatment is one of the main treatments for esophageal cancer patients, but pure surgery does not achieve satisfactory results. The main failure modes and the cause of death are local recurrence and distant metastasis. Studies have shown that the key to improve the local control rate and survival rate is postoperative adjuvant therapy, however, there is no unified conclusion that what kind of patients really benefit from postoperative adjuvant therapy. This paper briefly summarizes the current results of different patients received postoperative adjuvant radiation and analyzes the radiation field scope and the failure model of postoperative adjuvant radiation chemotherapy for esophageal cancer.