The romantic rise of Sir Robert Hart's postal service to its present remarkable state of efficiency, handling as it did in 1921 something like 440,000,000 articles of mail matter, is nowhere more marked than at its Shanghai centre. According to the last report 82,326,704 articles alone were posted here and the total for 1921 is probably not far below 90,000,000. Kuangtung province with its main distributing office at Canton dealt with something like 36,000,000 articles in 1920, and Peking and Chihli came second on the list with about 49,-
Now that the port has increased in. commercial importance to a point beyond the wildest dreams of the band of Customs officials who urged the establishment of an Imperial postal service, and that almost every day new courier lines
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.