On October 9, 2018, Sri Lanka Post issued a postage stamp in honor of World Post Day.

World Post Day is an international holiday celebrated annually on October 9. The date was chosen because it was on October 9, 1874, that the Universal Postal Union was founded. In 1969, at the XVI Congress of the Universal Postal Union in Tokyo (Japan), it was decided to celebrate "UPU Day", in 1984 the name of the holiday was changed to "World Post Day". The holiday is also part of the UN system of world and international days and is designed to promote the popularization and development of the postal service throughout the world.

On the day of the holiday, Sri Lanka Post issued a commemorative postage stamp. It depicts the post office building in the city of Kandy in 1897 and a postal stagecoach drawn by a pair of horses, which ran along the Colombo - Kandy route.

During the British colonial rule on the island, which was then called Ceylon, the postal service developed quite actively. In 1802, the post of the First Postmaster General was established, in 1812, official regulation of postal deliveries was introduced, new postal rates were established, later in 1815, the postal service was reorganized, which led to a significant expansion of the list of postal services in the main cities of the island, and post offices also appeared in the provinces.

Initially, all mail was delivered on foot (in the mountains and hard-to-reach areas, foot postmen are not uncommon even today). However, in 1820-1845, active construction of roads was underway, which gradually connected all the most important cities on the island. The expansion of the road network also had a beneficial effect on the development of the postal service.

The Ceylon postal service was the first in Asia to use postal stagecoaches to deliver passengers and mail. The first postal route of this kind was opened on February 1, 1832. It connected the capital of the state, Colombo, with Kandy, a large city in the central part of the island. Two light four-wheeled carts, drawn by a pair of horses, ran daily between the two cities. The coaches departed at four o'clock in the morning, heading towards each other, and the fare for a passenger was 2.10 shillings. For 19 long years, the postal stagecoach was the only way to deliver mail between Colombo and Kandy. In 1851, additional routes, the "Evening" and "Morning Mail" to Kandy, were added.

Postal stagecoaches were also actively used on other routes between the cities until the end of the 1860s. After that, the railway took over the main work of delivering mail.

The design of the postage stamp was probably based on an old photograph from the 1860s, depicting a Colombo-Kandy stagecoach in front of the Royal Hotel in Colombo.