The journey of a letter, from postbox to delivery – behind the scenes at Hongkong Post
The city’s postal service handles an average of 3.35 million letters and parcels each day, making it far from obsolete in the age of email. We post a letter in Wan Chai and follow its journey to an address in the New Territories
In the age of email, e-banking and even electronic greeting cards, postal services are often dismissed as “snail mail”. But the operations of the 177-year-old Hongkong Post are far from obsolete.
Every day, the government-owned utility handles an average of 3.35 million letters and parcels, destined for local and international addresses. That equates to about one item for every two residents of the city.
Despite the increasing digitisation of communication and growing competition from private parcel delivery services, Hongkong Post recorded an operating profit of HK$153 million (US$19.5 million) in the 2016-17 financial year. The service pledges to deliver small local letters within one working day, a target it says it meets 99.9 per cent of the time.
Whether senders post their letter at one of the city’s 125 post offices or in one of more than 1,150 stand-alone postboxes, it is the start of a meticulous process – one we learned about when we followed a letter posted one morning at the Wan Chai Post Office in Wu Chung House to the Morning Post Centre in Tai Po, New Territories.
At about 11.30am, a postal worker arrives at Wan Chai Post Office – code-named WCH – empties the postbox and seals a white postal bag containing the mail collected.
The bag is then taken to a back room, where basic details are logged in a computerised system, including the number of bags the postman has brought back, and their next destination. The bags are tagged with a coded sticker – in this case mostly CMC, indicating that its next stop is the Central Mail Centre.
