Postcard sent from Hong Kong to US finally arrives – 26 years late, prompting hunt for intended recipients
- When American Kim Draper opened her postbox to find a postcard sent in 1993, she thought it was junk mail before she saw the handwritten message
- Sent from a US-based father working as an engineer in China to his children, the postcard was mysteriously dated 26 years to the day before it arrived
It’s a story that has left people puzzled on both sides of the Pacific in recent days: the case of a postcard sent from Hong Kong to the United States, that took a little longer to arrive than normal – 26 years.
Had Kim Draper not noticed the card was dated 1993 when she opened her postbox on July 9, she might have thrown it away, believing the sender got the wrong address.
“People don’t really send postcards any more, so I thought it might be junk mail as it was in such great condition,” she says. “Then I looked and saw it was handwritten and thought it might be for a neighbour I had never met. Then I saw it was from 1993.”
Her curiosity piqued, Draper, who lives in the town of Springfield, the capital city of Illinois, shared her finding with a friend, who got in touch with their local newspaper. From there, news agencies picked up on the story, local TV crews started arriving at Draper’s house and the story went global. But the intended recipients were yet to be found.
In a peculiar twist, it was dated July 9, 1993: exactly 26 years before Draper found it.
The missive from an exotic faraway land was addressed to a Leena and Muhammad Ali Kizilbash, and bears a HK$2.30 stamp. On the front is an illustration of sampans – wooden boats sometimes used as homes or restaurants – afloat in Castle Peak Bay in Hong Kong’s northeastern Tuen Mun District.