More Fun Facts

…this day, more than a century ago, the Philippine postal service was reorganized, and would become the leading center of postal services within the entire Asian continent by 1767?

At the time, exchange of letters and transmitted communication were limited to people who held important positions in the government and priests of the Catholic Church. Letters and other documents were carried by badageros, who were essentially volunteers (as they were mostly unpaid).

Badageros performed their courier services by rotation and were assigned in pairs either to the tribunal (town hall) or the casa real (provincial capital). In order to carry out their duties, Badageros were assigned horses. This was important because they sere sometimes assigned urgent packages that they had to deliver at midnight.

Back then, envelopes weren’t mass produced yet and was not readily available. As a result, letters, communications, and documents were just folded up prior to delivery and secrecy in the mail was virtually non-existent.

What made matters worse (in terms of privacy) was that all parcels changed hands numerous times depending upon the number of towns between the place of origin and the place of final destination. The reason for this was that badageros did not go beyond adjoining towns and the parcels were delivered to the next succeeding town by that town’s badageros and so on, until the package reached its intended recipient.

By 1853, then Governor General Antonio de Urbiztondo issued a mandate that implemented the use of prepaid stamps on letters in the country. By the 1870s, stamps that were unique to the Philippines was put in circulation (until that point, stamps in the country were completely identical to the ones used in Spain). Unlike our present system of affixing stamps in the upper right hand corner of the envelope, stamps during this period were instead placed on the upper left hand corner.

More stamps were issued by the revolutionary government that followed and by the time of the American occupation, the iconic Manila Central Post Office was built to serve as the national headquarters of the then Bureau of Posts. It was destroyed during World War II, but was rebuilt and now serves as one of the most important landmarks in Metro Manila

With the overhaul of the Philippine constitution in the wake of the People Power Revolution, the postal service was rechristened the Postal Service Office (PSO) and was placed under the Department of Transportation and Communication (DoTC). By 1992, then President Fidel V. Ramos issued a decree that made the PSO into a Government Owned and Controlled Corporation (a GOCC, much like SBMA) and was renamed as the Philippine Postal Corporation (shortened to PHLPost).