One for the collectors

Some 5,000 people lined up outside the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (臺北市立美術館) last Friday morning to buy the final editions of the Modern Taiwanese Painting Postage Stamps series (臺灣近代畫作郵票). After acquiring their sets of stamps, they rushed to the temporary post office set up in the museum to send over 5,000 letters with first-day-of-issue postmarks. Many more people have mail-ordered the stamps. For these fervent stamp collectors, it was an event not to be missed.

The series, the first two parts of which were issued in 2002 and 2003, consists of stamps showing 12 representative works by some of the best-known Taiwanese painters, such as Lee Tze-feng (李澤藩) and Liao Chi-chun (廖繼春). Although there are more than 12 significant paintings in the history of modern Taiwanese painting, Chunghwa Post Co (中華郵政), the state-run postal service company, limited the series to make it rare, said Su Dai-hsiung (蘇達雄), chief of the philatelic section of Chunghwa Post.

"Rare" is not the word usually applied to Taiwan's stamps these days. Even supposedly rare commemorative stamps are issued in between 5 million and 6 million sets, many of which, some veteran stamp collectors said, end up on bulk mailings and are then thrown away by non-collectors.

"The past practice of issuing 5 million or 6 million commemorative sets is no longer realistic. We plan to lower the number to around 1.2 million in the future," Su said. The number of stamps for this Modern Taiwanese Painting Postage Stamps set is 6.4 million, slightly fewer than the 7.5 million and 6.8 million of its first and second sets.

Chunghwa Post puts the number of stamp collectors in Taiwan at between 20,000 and 30,000. The population of serious collectors, however, may be much lower.

"Fewer and fewer people have the hobby these days, maybe around 100,000, but Chunghwa Post keeps issuing a large number of stamps. As a result, prices are now at rock-bottom and people have lost interest in stamps because they are too commonplace," said Chen Tze-ching (陳志清), Web site designer for the company and host of the country's biggest philatelic Web site Ching Ching Stamp Collecting Net (清清集郵網).

Chen started collecting stamps in 1990, when investing in the stamp market was as popular as investing in stocks is today. Due to frenzied transactions, many stamps appreciated up to five times their face value in a year. With the profiteers leaving the stamps market and few new collectors joining, the market went into a downward spiral. Chen has stopped selling his collection because his stamps are now valued at 60 percent to 75 percent less than their face values.

"Stamps are now so oversupplied that some collectors have turned to more challenging collectables like telephone cards," Chen said.

Su promised that in the future some commemorative stamps would be issued in lower numbers. Each of the two versions of Harry Potter stamps, whose date of issue will coincide with the premiere of the third installment of the blockbuster movie series in May, will come in 600,000 sets. Stamps featuring the popular Japanese cartoon character Hello Kitty, scheduled to be issued in December, will have 1 million sets.

The choice of subjects for these two commemorative stamp sets aims to attract teenagers and children back into hobby.

"The stamp collecting population is aging. Common subjects like the national flag or the Red Cross logo do not work anymore. Hello Kitty will hopefully attract children and the children may then introduce their parents to stamp collecting," Su said.