Beijing Posts Museum is built on the previous address of a post office in Qing Dynasty. This is the best preserved post office of previous dynasty throughout Beijing city as it used to be served as the head quarter of post office in Qing Dynasty from year 1905 to 1907.
In 1907, the head quarter of Post Office had been moved to East Chang’an Street and therefore this building turned to be one of the post office branches in Beijing. It remained is function as a service center of Post Office throughout the years until 1959 and the building had been used for residential purpose. Finally in year 1996, the Beijing Postal Administration Office took over the building again and recover its original look according to the design of the First Branch of Post Office in Beijing as the background design for the Beijing Posts Museum. In February 1997, the Beijing Posts Museum was officially opened to public.
This is the great place if you wish to experience the feeling of being in an ancient Post Office of Qing Dynasty. The building is in a very typical Qing architecture with four-beam eight-column structure that combined both wooden materials and bricks. Although the building interior is placed in a very simple way, you may feel the solemnity of the surrounding as well. The major responsibility of the museum is to display the general development history of Post Office in Beijing. Over 300 pieces of documents, post office equipments, artifacts and more than 1000 precious old photographs have been used to elaborate the history since 1897 until nowadays. From here, we can understand what the difficulties faced by post office in Beijing during the conquering period of foreign power were, and how many efforts had been poured in order to maintain the power of posts. Moreover, you may also discover what an important role that post office is carried during the period without telephone and internet where people were waiting for a letter in order to know the news from another place. The museum has showed us the glorious history of Post Office Beijing in the past hundred years as well as its important status throughout the Posts history of China.