China’s Train Post Offices – Modern Chinese TPO Postal Markings

The following account of Chinese TPOs by Chu Tong has been extracted from a journal entitled: Stamps World: “The only academic, informative and interesting stamp magazine in Hong Kong,” published by Philatelic Publications Limited in October, 1983. It is rare indeed to find such articles in English.

ALTHOUGH Train Post Offices (TPO.’s) have existed in China since as early as the Ching (Qing) Dynasty, very little research has been done so far and this aspect of Chinese Postal History is, thus, still very much ‘virgin territory’.

In March 20, 1980 the Beijing branch of the China Stamp Company (now known as the Beijing Stamp Company) issued a special topical philatelic cover entitled ‘Postal Chops of the Thirty-six Railway Lines Passing Through Beijing’. This was the first such TPO. cover officially issued by the Chinese Post Office and its appearance gave rise to unprecedented interest in Chinese TPO items of all periods.

In spite of the official cover’s value and contribution to promoting research into Chinese Railway Postal History, the cover had three noticeable shortcomings:

(i) It was an officially produced philatelic item and not a postally used cover. (ii) It recorded chops from only a very geographically limited area of China (i.e., areas directly connected to Beijing by railway).

(iii) It did not record chops of all of the railway lines that pass through Beijing and was thus incomplete in even the limited area it was intended to cover. (From a study of the chops on TPO covers in our own possession, it can be proven that, in fact, more than 40 train post offices pass through Beijing.)

“The more one studies, the more one realizes how little one really knows.”
While reseaching modern Chinese railway postal history, we are often reminded of the above quotation. We sincerely hope that this very limited and sketchy article on Chinese train post offices and postal items will serve to promote interest in collecting and researching current Chinese railway postal items.

Below we have listed information on all of the Chinese Train Post Offices which are known to us. The information is presented in three columns, with the first column containine the names of the city post offices responsible for the administration of the respective train post offices, the second column containing the actual names of the train post offices and the third column containing the routes covered by the respective train post offices. The information in the columns is arranged according to the order in which the relevant administering post office’s name appears in the ‘ZHONGHUA RENMIN GONGHEGUO XINGZHENG CHU HUA JIANCE’

The only exception to this order is that, for convenience sake, we have placed the names of train post offices administered by the Beijing post office at the top of the list, before the names of those administered by the Shanghai post office.