On March 24, the Hangzhou branch of China Telecom announced that telegraph services in the city would be discontinued starting May 1. Currently, Hangzhou and Beijing are the only two cities in mainland China still offering telegraph services.
The news prompted many young people from across the country to visit the telecom business hall in Wulin Square, Hangzhou, to send a telegram as a form of nostalgic experience. The volume of telegrams surged to over 200 in a single day, with the pricing remaining at a decades-old rate of 0.14 yuan per word.
Telegraph service in Zhejiang Province officially began in 1883. During its peak in the 1980s, the Wulin business hall alone handled over 1,000 telegrams daily. In 1988, Zhejiang Province recorded an annual telegraph business volume of 20.1 million telegrams.
However, Hangzhou's only operational telegraph machine ceased functioning properly last year. As a result, current telegram services involve typing messages into a computer, printing them, and then mailing them, rather than using traditional telegraph machines.
After May 1, those wishing to send a telegram will have to visit the Beijing Unicom Xidan business hall, which houses the only remaining telegraph service window in Beijing. Here, customers fill out details such as date, time, sender and recipient addresses, and message content. The staff then use WeChat to transmit the information to telegraph operators who relay the message to its final destination for delivery to the recipient.