The current post office organisation in Indonesia is known as Pos Indonesia. It has a fascinating history. The first postage stamp in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies was issued on 1 April 1864. It had a picture of King Willem III of the Netherlands, and the face value was ten cents. Subsequent stamp designs showed further pictures of the Dutch royal family in either one or two colours. In this period the stamps were mostly printed in the Netherlands by the firm of Joh. Enschedé Haarlem. However, there were also stamps printed locally by Reproductie drijf Topografische dienst. The early postal service was called Post-Telegraaf- en Telefoondienst. This is Dutch for the post, telegraph and telephone service. This version of the Indonesian postal service was initially established in 1906. It remained in operation for 49 years. It was widely referred to as PTT (which is an acronym for Post-Telegraaf- en Telefoondienst).
After the Second World War the central post office in Bandung was taken into state control following the declaration of independence by the newly named Indonesia. Renamed the Indonesia Post Administration, the first stamp was issued in 1946 and showed a cow and the Indonesian flag. It was printed in Yogyakarta in two colours. In 1954 the stamp-printing process was transferred to the new local printer Pertjetakan Kebajoran. The PTT was responsible for distributing the stamps to every post office in the country. Stamps in this period depicted themes including agriculture, industry, social welfare, rural development, politics and transportation. People who featured on subsequent stamps included Sukarno, the first President of Indonesia, as well as Indonesian heroes such as Abdul Muis, Sultan Hasanuddin, Suryopranoto, Teungku Cik di Tiro, Tuanku Imam Bonjol, Teuku Umar, K. H. Samanhudi, Kapitan Pattimura, K. H. Ahmad Dahlan, Sisingamangaraja XII and Ki Hajar Dewantara.
The PTT was converted into a state-owned company in 1961. In 1965 it was divided into two separate companies. One focused on telecommunication while the other focused on mail. The mail services company was subsequently reorganised in 1978 and renamed as Pos Indonesia in 1995. Pos Indonesia operates in 11 regional divisions across the country. The first number of an area’s postal code indicates which region an address is in. The next two digits identify the city or region. The fourth digit identifies the district in more detail, while the fifth digit indicates the specific place.
A postal code starting with 1 is in Jakarta, Banten or West Java. A code starting with 2 is in Aceh, North Sumatra, West Sumatra, Riau or the Riau Islands. A 3 indicates Bengkulu, Jambi, Bangka-Belitung, South Sumatra or Lampung. A 4 indicates Banten or West Java (in different areas to the areas covered by the 1 codes). A 5 indicates Central Java or Yogyakarta, and a 6 indicates East Java. Up to this point the postal codes are more or less identical to the first 6 of the 11 regional divisions of the post office (Pos Indonesia) but, interestingly, the postal codes only go up to the number 9, while there are 11 regions. The reasons for this different between the postal codes and the regional divisions are complex – in order to explain it we will need to consider the organisation of the post office in more detail.
Each region operates 200 or more sub-regions. These range from inner city and outer city, to towns and villages in the countryside. The country also contains 17,000 islands that can only be reached by sea or by air. There are 3,700 post offices in the country in total. The reason why the numbers of the regions don’t match up with the numbers used in the postal codes is partly to do with the size of the regional divisions.