Biography | Houlin Zhao — Born in This Canal City, Not in Geneva

People treat an ITU secretary-general as a Geneva product because that is where the tower stands.

The first dated line is a canal town in Jiangsu.

Houlin Zhao was born on 7 March 1950 in Gaoyou, a county-level city under Yangzhou.

ITU curricula vitae printed while he held office give the day and the province.

Later Chinese reporting, including a 2023 hometown interview carried by The Paper, names the town itself.

The pin is not a family house.

It is Yucheng Yi, the Ming courier station on the south side of the old city, a public monument and the largest surviving postal stop of its kind in China.

Gaoyou's older nickname is Yucheng, the inverted-bowl city, and the station takes that name.

A visitor standing in the courtyard is standing in the town, not in a private room.

A Chinese encyclopaedia page later drifted to 19 June for the birthday.

The dated Union biographies keep 7 March, and that is the date used here.

He was the eldest of six brothers in a tailor's household.

Junior middle school ended in 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution.

He was sent to rural work at Hengjing commune, then into a factory, before an examination took him to Nanjing.

None of that later work is claimed by this courtyard.

The point of the pin is simpler.

The first Chinese secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union did not start on Place des Nations.

He started in a canal city whose old business was moving letters by horse and boat.

In the 1990s, long after he had left for Geneva, he helped connect the restored station to international postal-history meetings.

That is a coda, not the birth.

The station has been a National Key Cultural Relics site since 1996 and sits inside the Grand Canal world-heritage listing.

It is the honest public place to stand if you want the town without knocking on a door.

Photo: Yucheng Postal Stop entrance, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons