The French post offices abroad were a global network of

post office A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional se ...

s in foreign countries established by

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

to provide

mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letters, and parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid-19th century, national postal sys ...

service where the local services were deemed unsafe or unreliable. They were generally set up in cities with some sort of French commercial interest. They started appearing in the early 19th century, reached their heyday at the beginning of the 20th century, then started closing down in the 1910s and 1920s, with the office at Kwangchou in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

holding out until the 1940s. Offices abroad: *

French post offices in China The French post offices in China were among the post offices maintained by foreign powers in China from the mid-19th century until 1922. The first French Post Office in China opened in 1862. Initially, the French government used ordinary French ...

* French post offices in Crete *

French post offices in Egypt The French post offices in Egypt were a system of post offices maintained by France in Egypt during the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. They were primarily intended to facilitate commercial and trading interests that needed t ...

* French post offices in the Ottoman Empire * French post offices in Zanzibar

Sources

* Stanley Gibbons Ltd: various catalogues
AskPhil – Glossary of Stamp Collecting Terms

* Rossiter, Stuart & John Flower. ''The Stamp Atlas''. London: Macdonald, 1986.

External links

https://web.archive.org/web/20100918014836/http://www.rpsl.org.uk/indochina/index.html {{PostalhistoryEurope Postage stamps of France Postal system of France