The General Post Office building stands at the point where Sichuan Road crosses Suzhou Creek, just north of the Bund, on a site the postal service has occupied since the 1920s. It is a large, square neoclassical block in grey stone with a tall clock tower at one corner, and it was built to demonstrate that the Chinese-run postal service could match the foreign-administered institutions that surrounded it. It still functions as a post office on the ground floor, and the upper floors house the Shanghai Postal Museum.
The building
The best part of the visit is the architecture itself. The main hall on the ground floor has a marble floor, heavy columns and a long counter, and it is used every day by people buying stamps and sending parcels, which makes it far more interesting than a preserved interior behind glass. The tower is visible from the Bund and from the bridges over the creek, and from the windows on the upper floors there are excellent views down Suzhou Creek towards the Huangpu and across to the towers of Lujiazui.
The museum
The collection traces the postal service from the imperial relay system, through the foreign-run post offices of the treaty ports and the first Chinese stamps, to the modern network. Exhibits include early stamp sheets and cancellations, postal uniforms, sorting equipment, hand-stamped cancellations, mail carried by rail and air, and reconstructions of sorting halls. There is a section on the role of the mail in the treaty port economy and on the philatelic history of the period, which is genuinely well presented. Labels are in Chinese and English through much of the museum.
Practical notes
The museum is open from mid-morning to mid-afternoon on most days and closed on Mondays; admission is free or nominal. It is a ten minute walk from the northern end of the Bund, and the area around it - the old warehouses along Suzhou Creek and the surviving bridges - is worth the walk on its own. Allow about an hour for the museum, more if you want to look at the philatelic material closely. Combine it with the Bund, which is immediately south, and with the riverside walk along the creek.
