A
}
JAYAKUMA
Moving the Mail
:
From the founding of Hong Kong in the 1840s when some 250 letters a day were handled to the one million letters and parcels now processed daily, the Post Office has kept in step with the times. A modern, efficient department, it has grown from a small, wooden building located on a site near St John's Cathedral in Central District to a network of 75 post offices strategically located throughout Hong Kong. The General Post Office, a notable landmark on the harbour waterfront, cur- rently handles the bulk of mail at some stage. However, the $53.5 million Inter- national Mail Centre in Kowloon will become the major mail processing centre when it opens in 1980. The centre will contain the most up-to-date equipment and use streamlined procedures to handle the growing volume of incoming and outgoing foreign mail, as well as local mail. In most areas of Hong Kong, there are two mail deliveries each weekday. The Post Office aims to deliver 95 per cent of mail arriving or posted in Hong Kong within one work- ing day and to despatch air mail overseas on the same day, if possible. It also provides the fast Speedpost service to 15 countries. During 1979, the Post Office issued an estimated 190 million stamps in 14 denominations up to $20, including three special stamp issues on interesting aspects of Hong Kong. It was a far cry from 1862 when the first Hong Kong issue consisted of 1,040,160 stamps of seven denominations, of which the highest was 96 cents.
8X
NG KONG
Previous page: A prompt collection service is provided by the Post Office. Left: Mail bags bound for Bangladesh are delivered to a freighter moored in Victoria Harbour; posted in the morning, a Speedpost consign- ment is on its way to the United States in the afternoon; sea mail for South Africa is loaded into a container at the General Post Office.
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