I ordered a book from Britain recently, and had a lot of postal difficulties with UPS. The bookseller asked me to provide my Chinese address in pinyin which I did, but I was confused as to why, until I finally received the parcel.

UPS parcel showing address with name blanked out

Here’s the address in full:

409A Õ1̂ùõ ‖ ¼õ©é
409A Õ1̂ùõ ‖ ¼õ©é
μÁÀμÀÇÕ1̂ ‖ μ©àÕ1̂ÄÕñ°Õİᵃ Õİᵃþö⨍Õà¼Õ»ô6ẢÀμÑ╝ ÒÇèμáíÕøİÕìùõ¥°

Obviously the character encoding got mangled and wasn’t able to render the Chinese characters.

My first guess is this is a limitation of whatever font UPS is using for their shipping labels. No clues from Reddit, although I did find this site which identifies and sells1 fonts used on receipts from all sorts of companies, including UPS.

It seems like a major flaw for an international shipping company to only support addresses in latin characters.

A challenge for anyone reading this post, if you can decode the address above, send me a postcard (before June 2024).2

  1. It’s ok, their FAQ explains the receipt fonts are “not for making fake receipts”. ↩

  2. Only comfortable giving out my address like this because I move out in a few months anyway. ↩