Mail services

The Chinese mail service, a traditional communication system, still plays a significant role in people's daily life today. In China, post offices uses a striking green symbol and can be found everywhere in the cities and towns.

Post offices are open seven days a week, 8am-8pm; smaller offices may close earlier for lunch, or be closed at weekends. You can also send mails from the green postboxes, but these are few and distant except in the major cities, or at tourist hotels, which typically have a postbox at the front desk.

The best way to mail a letter or parcel is by Express Mail Service – EMS (www.ems.com.cn/english-main.jsp), which operates to most destinations within China and to most countries. Its service is rapid, reliable and under normal circumstances, it take a day to reach destinations in the same city, less than a week to other destinations in China, and several weeks or even months to destinations abroad. Customers can call to 11185, the 24-hour hot line of EMS, for consultation about their mailing.

In general, it is cheap to mail a domestic letter in China, but the cost varies according to the weight of the mail and the delivering distance. By contrast, overseas postal can be expensive and take a lot of time.

To send parcels, you need to go to the main post office with the goods you want to send and the staff will help you pack them. You can buy boxes here. Parcel service from China is good and reliable, but there are many forms to fill in Chinese and French (the international postal language). A one-kilogram parcel costs around 8 dollars by surface mail and 12 dollars by air.

You can buy envelopes and stamps in all of the post offices. Don’t forget to stick the adequate-value stamp tightly on the envelope and write the address clearly. The zip code of the destination is necessary, too.

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