The Korean post office at Wonsan in the summer of 1901 / Charles Henry Hawes, “In the Uttermost East,” Harper & Brothers, 1903

In the summer of 1900, Francis Arthur Coleridge, a 30-year-old Englishman with the Indian Civil Service, made a brief visit to Wonsan aboard the Japanese steamship Tarien Maru. Coleridge had a keen eye for detail and a deft pen in describing the port — its charms and vexations. There were things that he found intriguing and quaint, while others struck him as frustrating, yet amusing — the Korean post office being one of the latter.

Coleridge described the Korean post office as tucked away “in one of the most out-of-the-way places in the town” with no signs indicating its location. He called it “the most primitive of places” noting that it “lies inside a little court-yard and consists of two little wooden rooms with a little wooden verandah.”

Korea had recently joined the Postal Union and had introduced “six varieties of stamps of its own” in addition to a “full issue of Japanese stamps with the word ‘Corea’ sur-charged on them” Judging by the abundance of postcards and envelopes from this period, there was a keen interest in Korean and Japanese postage stamps mailed from the Korean Peninsula. Not only were these stamps unique, they were also fairly expensive and thus prized by........

© The Korea Times