30-Second Overview: In 1888, Liu Ming-chuan established the Taiwan Postal Bureau in Taipei Prefecture. After 1895, postal services were integrated into the transportation and telecommunications network of Japanese colonial rule. Today, Chunghwa Post simultaneously delivers mail, manages savings, sells insurance, and handles logistics, reinventing itself through 24-hour i-Postboxes and mobile post offices. This article argues that the most important function of the post office has never been merely delivering letters, but ensuring that a person from afar, a small deposit, or a public service has the opportunity to reach the specific individual at that address.
Image: Solomon203 / Wikimedia Commons Archive Page, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A Letter Without a House Number
Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / Wikimedia Commons Archive Page, CC BY-SA 3.0.
In 2015, the Shuilin Post Office in Yunlin County received a letter sent from Taoyuan. The envelope bore only the postal code and the words "Miss Lin [Redacted]," with no address. By regulation, this letter could have become a "dead letter," but postal worker Lin Hung-chi, reading the handwriting, guessed the sender was young. Recalling a young woman surnamed Lin who had married into the responsibility zone from Taoyuan, he attempted delivery based on memory, finding the recipient on the first try. 1
A few years earlier, another letter from Yokohama, Japan, also lacked a house number, leaving only an English street name and the recipient's name. Post office worker Li Shang-hsuan first consulted the telephone directory, then compared letters one by one in the delivery zone, finally spending over ten hours searching for the person on Facebook. The letter contained a certificate of employment for the recipient while working in Japan. The house number omitted by the sender nearly caused a segment of life to get stuck in the post office's return process. 1
These stories resemble movies, yet they are not standard procedures of the postal system. What they reveal is the layer behind standard procedures: addresses are rules on paper, but mail carriers use their familiarity with the local area to translate those rules into "I know where this person lives."
📝 Curator's Note: The most touching aspect of postal services lies not in the four characters "mission accomplished," but in the willingness of someone to treat a name as a clue rather than an error when addresses fail.
The Sixteen Articles in Taipei Prefecture
On February 21, 1888, Liu Ming-chuan, the first governor of Taiwan, issued the "Sixteen Articles of Taiwan Postal Services." One month later, on March 22, the Taiwan Postal Bureau was established in Taipei Prefecture, issuing stamps and accepting civilian mail. Chunghwa Post officially regards this history as the starting point of Taiwan's modern postal system, but also specifically notes that this innovation was not extended to the mainland regions under the Qing dynasty's jurisdiction. 2 3
There is a contrast easily obscured by a timeline. Taiwan's imagination of modern postal services did not descend from a complete state apparatus, but began as an institutional experiment by a local governor in Taipei City. Eight years later, on March 20, 1896, the Qing court officially approved the Great Qing Postal Bureau according to the regulations drafted by Robert Hart. The Postal Museum regards this day as the date when modern state-owned postal services obtained legal status. 2 4
Therefore, 1888 and 1896 are not two versions of the same event. The former is the new-style postal service established by Liu Ming-chuan in Taiwan; the latter is the Qing court's establishment of the legal beginning of modern postal services on a national scale. Compressing the two into a single "postal services began in year X" flattens Taiwan's unique position in institutional history.
Next to the Mailbox: Telecommunications and Savings
After Japanese troops landed in Taiwan in 1895, they first established field post offices in occupied territories. The Taiwan Historical and Cultural Map of the Academia Sinica records that these field post offices were successively established in 23 locations. In April 1896, military postal services were abolished, ordinary postal services continued, and postal and telecommunications services were merged into Post and Telecommunication Offices. By 1902, postal and telecommunications institutions were divided into four levels: first-class, second-class, third-class, and branch offices. 5
This was more than just changing signs. For postal services to operate in mountain roads, ports, and newly established towns, they had to establish layers for collection, sealing, delivery, telegraphy, and personnel management. Academia Sinica, based on Taiwan Castle Maps and relevant historical materials, compiled 92 postal and telecommunications institutions, of which 52 were Post and Telecommunication Offices, along with Post Offices, Telecommunication Offices, and various forms of branch offices. The small symbols on the map were actually a diagram of how the colonial government cut space into manageable nodes. 5
From Chunghwa Post's official history and postal videos preserved in the National Palace Museum's National Cultural Memory Database, it is evident that this system did not serve only the rulers. It simultaneously developed savings, remittances, insurance, and telephones. After the war, it incorporated mechanization, rural postal services, and postal savings into construction plans. Postal services thus entered local life, becoming the same window for sending letters, depositing money, remitting funds, and waiting for news. 2 6
In other words, the post office is both the channel through which the state sends out orders and the channel through which ordinary people send family letters, goods, and money into their lives. The coexistence of these two directions is the first contradiction left by postal services in Taiwan.
1968: Machines Begin Taking Over Letters
The National Palace Museum's National Cultural Memory Database preserves a 1968 film titled Today's Postal Services. The footage captures the exterior of the Taipei Post Office, employees handling postal work, and mail carriers setting off on motorcycles to deliver letters. The voiceover describes postal services as one of the public utilities most closely related to people's lives. At that time, there were already 7,218 postal institutions of various levels across Taiwan, with the postal department listing mechanization, postal savings, and rural postal services as construction goals. 6
The machines in the film were not merely tools for efficiency. On March 20, 1970, postal services implemented postal codes. In November of the same year, automatic electronic letter-sorting machines purchased from Japan arrived in Taipei, completing the final step of mechanized mail processing. The few numbers on an envelope thus became the common language between manual sorting and machine recognition. 6
The Postal Museum's "Chronicles of Post Stations" exhibition places this history next to mailboxes, basket carts, models of mail transport tools, and sorting equipment. The modernization of postal services occurred not only in regulations, but in every action of a letter being received at the counter, stamped, sealed, transported, and finally handed to the delivery person. 4
📝 Curator's Note: A postal code looks like cold numbers, but behind it lies the moment when Taiwan handed over "I know where you live" to be completed jointly by humans and machines.
The People in Green Uniforms Became the Eyes of the Local Area
The work of mail carriers appears to be fixed routes on the surface, but in reality, it accumulates local knowledge. Yunlin Shuilin mail carrier Wu Chen-hsiung said: "Mail carriers always come to ring the bell." In villages without doorbells, he had to knock first and then shout, "Is anyone home!" Over time, the elderly would ask him to help send letters, pick up medicine, or buy bento boxes. This quote appears in local reports compiled by the Yunlin Post Office of Chunghwa Post, preserving the local tone verbatim. 1
This familiarity could also play a role in critical moments. Officially compiled reports record that a postal worker, upon noticing an elderly person had not appeared for several days while delivering mail, visited their home to check. Another mail carrier, upon finding a woman who had collapsed on the road during delivery, assisted in calling an ambulance and visited her in the hospital. These are not delivery steps required by postal regulations, but a sensitivity to "why haven't I seen this person today" accumulated over years of fixed routes. 1
Since 2008, Chunghwa Post has encouraged employees to care for elderly people living alone during delivery. In the Yunlin case compiled officially, postal workers would monitor whether the elderly appeared on fixed routes, assist in reporting issues, and even help handle daily postal matters outside of delivery. These stories do not represent every mail carrier route, but they illustrate how mail carrier routes were institutionally used to catch the gaps in local society. 1
📝 Curator's Note: When an elderly person remembers a mail carrier as "the person who comes five days a week," postal services are no longer just a transport system. They also become an expected visit in the life of remote areas.
A Company Still Bearing Universal Service
In 1949, the Postal Bureau and the Postal Savings and Remittance Bureau moved to Taiwan. On January 1, 2003, the Postal Bureau was restructured into Chunghwa Post Co., Ltd., a company 100% held by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. The corporate form changed, but services such as postal work, savings, remittances, simplified life insurance, and stamp collecting remained within the same service network. 2 3
This "tri-business operation" makes post offices unlike courier companies doing only one business or banks handling only deposits. They must face private delivery and financial competition in metropolitan areas while maintaining universal service in offshore islands, mountainous areas, and small towns. Local historical materials from the Chiayi Post Office show that Chiayi was approved as a main mail station in 1888, and the old post office building completed in 1939 was announced as a historical building in 2004. What the post office left in the local area is both a service point and the material memory of the city. 6
Chunghwa Post's own company profile also acknowledges that market and digital trends have changed the operating conditions of postal services. The company maintains postal work, savings/remittances, and life insurance while promoting smart logistics, digital finance, and AI fraud prevention. The issue is not just "whether to digitize," but whether a state-owned system bearing universal service can simultaneously achieve low thresholds and high speed. 2
A Post Office Building is Also a Map
Post offices exist not only on mail carrier routes but also in the urban streetscape. The Chiayi Post Office was completed in 1939, originally a first-class office during the Japanese colonial period. Today, it is preserved as a historical building, with its original interior space largely intact. The value of this architectural preservation lies not just in the aesthetics of the facade, but in the fact that it once concentrated collection, sealing, delivery, and local administration into the same address. 6
Taipei's postal history similarly overlaps with urban space. Liu Ming-chuan planned the Taipei Prefecture Postal Bureau; during the Japanese colonial period, postal and telecommunications services were managed jointly; after the war, they were managed separately. Thus, post offices are always simultaneously connected to streets, wires, motorcycles, counters, and people waiting. 2 3 7
When a post office building is preserved, what is actually preserved is a scale of public life: people do not need to first become large enterprises or familiar with financial jargon; as long as they walk through the door, they can send letters, remit funds, deposit money, or inquire about matters. This is also the difference between post office architecture and general commercial storefronts.
Another Kind of Arrival in the Passbook
Postal services are often remembered as "places for sending letters," but savings, remittances, and simplified life insurance have always been important parts of it. Official data lists postal work, savings, and life insurance as core businesses, noting that the post office network extends to townships, urban districts, and offshore islands. For many people, what the post office delivers is not news from afar, but financial services that can be handled nearby. 2
This function continues to change today. A 2023 press release from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications shows that Chunghwa Post cooperates with the Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corporation (TDCC), allowing postal savings customers to authorize via the Mobile Post Office app to query postal account balances, transaction details, and time deposit balances. Financial services are no longer confined to passbooks and counters; they are beginning to connect with apps of other institutions. 8
This extension brings a question that must be retained: digital finance makes it faster for those familiar with mobile phones, but one cannot assume everyone can log in, authorize, and identify risks with equal ease. The public nature of the post office ultimately returns to whether it is willing to keep a clear path for those unfamiliar with new tools.
From Mail Carrier Routes to i-Postboxes
In 2021, Chunghwa Post launched a more comprehensive digital transformation, proposing three goals: improving operational efficiency, optimizing customer experience, and innovating business models. An iThome report noted that the new Mobile Post Office app, launched in 2022, had over 5.4 million downloads in just over a year. The i-Postbox, launched in 2016, extended the time for sending and receiving packages from counter business hours to 24 hours. 9
Transformation does not mean driving everyone into mobile phones. A 2023 Ministry of Transportation and Communications press release shows that postal savings customers can authorize via the Mobile Post Office to use the TDCC e-Hand to query passbook savings balances, transaction details, and time deposit balances. Post offices are still doing finance, but the entry point has extended from counters to apps between different institutions. 8
In 2025, Chunghwa Post announced that there are now over 2,400 i-Postboxes, listing cross-border B2C postal services, free trade port area cargo transfer postal exports, and international e-packets as directions for smart logistics. These services make post offices look more like logistics nodes, and the word "postal services" leaves the envelope, entering e-commerce, cross-border transactions, and self-service pickup. 10
But the costs and limitations of transformation are also clear. When post offices simultaneously maintain nationwide postal, savings/remittance, and life insurance services while introducing smart logistics and digital finance, efficiency, universal service, and usage thresholds cannot be solved by a single app alone. New machines can accelerate certain processes, but they cannot automatically eliminate every friction left by old systems. 2
When iThome interviewed Chunghwa Post Assistant General Manager Chen Tung-liang, he said: "Facing the challenges brought by macro-environmental trends, if post offices still use PC and physical location operational models, they will be eliminated sooner or later without change." 9 This sentence sounds like a tech transformation manifesto, but placed in the postal context, it is more of a dilemma: post offices must become faster, but they cannot leave behind those who need counters, paper, and a person to explain things.
Official recent practices have not been to remove counters entirely, but to split services into different entry points: i-Postboxes handle packages, the Mobile Post Office handles accounts and insurance, and post office counters continue to handle matters requiring face-to-face confirmation. Whether this分流 (分流) can truly relieve frontline pressure depends on whether the system is integrated, data is interoperable, and whether those unfamiliar with digital tools are left behind. 2 8
Who is Written Last in the Address
From the Sixteen Articles in Taipei Prefecture, to the 1970 postal codes, to today's i-Postboxes, postal services have continuously changed the technology of "arrival." In Liu Ming-chuan's era, post offices first had to establish rules; the Japanese colonial Post and Telecommunication Offices integrated local areas into administrative networks; post-war mechanization allowed large volumes of letters to be sorted; digital services moved packages and accounts into mobile phones and self-service kiosks. 2 5 7 10
Every change made the system more efficient, but also redecided who is easily served and who needs to walk an extra mile. The reason a letter without a house number could be delivered was not because technology did not exist, but because a postal worker was willing to fill institutional gaps with local experience. The reason elderly people living alone know someone will come to ring the bell is not because postal services are inherently gentle, but because a fixed route叠 (叠) together the time of people.
Post offices appear old-fashioned precisely because they place state services into the smallest daily units: an address, a mailbox, a passbook, a bell ring. The problem it truly faces is not whether letters will disappear, but whether Taiwan still wants to keep a person who can walk to your doorstep and know who is missing today, after everything can be done via an app.
- Yunlin Post Office: Local Postal Stories — Chunghwa Post official compilation of local reports, providing specific scenes and quotes for address-less letters, postal workers, and elderly living alone.↩2345
- Chunghwa Post Official Company Profile — Chunghwa Post historical evolution, business, restructuring, and modern strategy.↩2345678910
- Welcome to Chunghwa POST - About Us — Chunghwa Post English official historical evolution, cross-referencing 1888, 1895, 1896, 1949, and 2003 nodes.↩23
- Postal Museum: Permanent Exhibition "Chronicles of Post Stations" — Postal Museum official exhibition page, explaining postal systems and collection, sealing, transport, and delivery operations.↩2
- Taiwan Postal Services during the Japanese Colonial Period — Academia Sinica Taiwan Historical and Cultural Map, verifying field post offices, postal/telecom institution classification, and 92 institutions.↩23
- Chiayi Post Office: Historical Evolution and Brief History of Establishment — Chunghwa Post local historical materials, verifying Chiayi main station, field post offices, and 1939 historical building.↩2345
- Today's Postal Services — 1968 postal film preserved in the National Palace Museum's National Cultural Memory Database and description, verifying 7,218 institutions, postal codes, and mechanization.↩2
- Chunghwa Post Cooperates with TDCC to Open Banking Business — Ministry of Transportation and Communications official press release, explaining Mobile Post Office and open banking query services.↩23
- Century-Old Post Office Undergoes Comprehensive Digital Transformation, Relying on IT to Optimize Services and Create a Postal Life Circle — iThome exclusive interview, verifying digital transformation, Mobile Post Office, i-Postbox, RPA, and Chen Tung-liang quote.↩2
- Chunghwa Post Participates in 2025 Asia Pacific Smart Business Logistics Exhibition — Chunghwa Post official news, verifying over 2,400 i-Postboxes and cross-border logistics directions.↩2