广州邮政博物馆

The Guangzhou Postal Museum occupies 43 Yanjiang West Road in Liwan District, on the Xidi stretch of the Pearl River waterfront, alongside the old Canton Customs House with its clock tower, the Nanfang Building and Taying Lou, forming the densest cluster of modern public buildings in the city. The site was already the Great Qing post office in 1897; the original building burned down on 9 November 1912, and in 1913 the premises were assigned to Canton Customs to build a new postal headquarters, designed by a British engineer, completed and opened in 1916. Postal business was first managed by Customs and taken over by the Guangdong Postal Administration in 1918. During the fall of Guangzhou in 1938 a fire on Xidi destroyed doors, windows and floors; Yang Yongtang led a restoration from 1939 that kept the structure and external appearance, finished in January 1942, and in October 1945 Li Yisang became director, ending foreign management of Chinese postal services. The building faces south on a trapezoidal plan in classical European style: the main south block is three and a half storeys (half a level below ground) at 18 metres, with a two-storey north annex, and 1,740 square metres of floor area, its yellow-brown granite base and giant colonnade a fixture of the Xidi skyline. Listed as a municipal heritage site in 1999, it opened as a postal museum on 13 May 2002 and became a provincial protected site (4-103) that July. About 1,500 square metres of display area holds three halls: stamp retail on the ground floor, China's postal communications and Guangzhou's postal history on the second, and the service's development on the third. Cartier's Panthère exhibition ran here in April 2023; renovation began in November 2024 to convert the building for exhibitions, performances and launches, and reopening should be confirmed with the owner.