Is the era of handwritten letters ending in China?

Handwritten letter in a foreign language. Photo provided to China Daily

The reforms also led to the segregation of telecom from postal services that were previously bundled together.

In the past decade or so, as technology started to spread across Shiquan, rich villagers took to cellphones and eventually gave up writing letters. Only those that didn't own phones stayed in touch with loved one through the conventional delivery of messages, taking days.

"But now almost every family in a village here has at least one cellphone. So, letter-writing has reduced a lot," Zhao says.

In 2013, some 88.7 percent of every 100 Chinese on the mainland subscribed to mobile or cellular telephony, according to International Telecommunication Union, a Geneva-based United Nations agency. There were only 2,000 Internet-using families in China in 1993, a research paper of government think-tank Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said.

The trend of falling paper communication is global.

The worldwide letter-post traffic was 350.9 billion items in 2012, when a 3.5 percent slide from the earlier year was recorded by Universal Postal Union, another UN body.

In China's case, the e-commerce boom－more noticeable than in some other parts of the world－h(huán)as forced traditional businesses to change.