Postman warms hearts on icy plateau
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Warm-hearted mailman Hanong Dorje plies his van across the snowy western plateau of Sichuan Province where temperatures can plunge below -10 C.

Over the last 14 years Dorje has not missed a day's work, delivering more than 4.5 million pieces of mail without losing a single piece.

The "grassland messenger" as Dorje is sometimes dubbed by residents, has traveled more than 400,000 kilometers, or about seven times around the equator.

"It was my destiny to become a mailman," Dorje says.

Mailman Hanong Dorje eats lunch in Zoige county, Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province on June 17, 2021. (Xinhua)

Dorje's hero was his father, a postman who traversed mountains by bicycle, armed with a large green bag of envelopes.

As a child during the 1980s, Dorje would entreat his father to take him along too. The mail recipients would occasionally hand a candy to the postman's boy of Zoige, a county in Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture.

It was in 2007, at 23, that Dorje finally got to follow in his father's footsteps.

His route is lonely, but Dorje's world is rich.

During crisis snow days, it is the mailman who must deliver vital supplies – food, medicine and oxygen – to residents of a prefecture with a population density of fewer than eight people per square kilometer.

As the transport infrastructure improves and e-commerce blooms, Dorje's world is changing. Business parcels are increasingly moving up, down and across the plateau.

"I hope that through the [postal] network, more products from home will be brought out of the mountains and into thousands of households," he says.

(Translated by Liang Yuting, edited by Huang Jingjing; Source: Xinhua)