A stamp that was pulled from circulation the day it was issued because it failed to show Taiwan as part of China fetched a record price at auction in Hong Kong on Sunday.
The rare 1968 stamp was picked up by an unidentified Asian buyer, who paid HK$3.68 million (US$475,000), a record for a Chinese stamp.
Six other smaller stamps of the same design were also sold for a combined HK$2.93 million.
Designer Wan Weisheng (萬維生), who watched the hammer fall, said he had feared he would be punished for his mistake.
“For a long time I was really worried that I would be jailed,” he said. “Officials told me that it was a really big mistake, but in the end nothing happened.”
Wan and other designers had been commissioned to make a series of stamps during the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of mass political and social upheaval in China starting in the mid-sixties.
His stamp features a worker holding The Little Red Book, a book of Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) quotations, and a red China map in the background.
On the map is written “The whole country is red” (Quanguo shanhe yi pian hong, 全國山河一片紅).
However, Wan left Taiwan uncolored, sparking a recall of the stamps just half a day after their release.
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