She may be just another pretty face on a horseback, but this Russian woman is doing a yeoman service for the villages around Moscow and creating waves in China! Meet Maria Rubtsova, who delivers mail on a horseback to villagers around the Russian capital city.
An employee of Russian Post, this 24-year-old woman volunteered to relocate herself in Moscow suburbs in 2015. Here she took up the responsibility of delivering mail to eight villages that fell under her jurisdiction.
What distinguished her from other mail carriers was she chose a horse over walking or riding a bicycle to do her job. Her black horse named Cosmos has become her ideal companion on all her mail delivery missions. Rubtsova obviously is an animal lover, as she also looks after two horses, a calf, goats, ducks, hens and three dogs.
Her daily routine would have gone unnoticed, had it not been for a documentary made about her job and telecast on a Chinese channel. This documentary was filmed by China’s CGTN TV channel to highlight that 90 percent of all packages delivered by Rubtsova come from Chinese online stores.
This caught the attention of the officials of AliExpress, an online Chinese trading platform owned by the global retail giant Alibaba, that boasts of an estimated customer base of 15 million in Russia alone.According to Dai Shan, President of Alibaba’s business-to-business unit, this shopping website has built over 100 million international shoppers since 2010, when it first started.
A statement given out by Russia Post says it all, “The young woman impressed the officials from the Chinese company (AliExpress)…. After the documentary about the amazing postwoman was released in China, she gained almost two million fans.”
Such was Rubtsova’s popularity as a horse riding postwoman that she was even invited as a guest at the Global Shopping Festival, held at Shanghai. Before she proceeded for Shanghai, Rubtsova had this to say, “I’m sure that I won’t only get pleasant impressions of China, but also receive new tips about how the online trade is organized.”
The way Rubtsova’s popularity is soaring in China, she and her adorable horse are not going to fade away from the public eye anytime soon.