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Crowds gather for peek at rare stamp collections

Hundreds of people lined up outside the Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) yesterday morning on the first day of the Asia International Stamp Exhibition.

This is the 21st exhibition; Taiwan was also the host country for the event in 2005.

During the five-day event, more than 1,000 frames of stamps will compete for the Grand Prix d'Honneur, the highest honor in the exhibition.

Meanwhile, 25 other frames of stamps will be on display in the non-competitive class. Generally, stamps in this class have garnered quite a few international awards and have been recognized as valuable stamp collections.

The flying geese stamps (飛雁郵票), presented by Taiwan Post, is one of the most eagerly anticipated collections of this year's exhibition.

The stamps were originally printed in Shanghai without a face value and were brought to Taiwan by the Nationalist government in 1949. The government later launched currency reforms the same year and reissued the stamps in a New Taiwan dollar denomination.

The post office issued three runs of flying geese stamps. Those on display this year are from the first edition, and were printed with values of NT$1, NT$2, NT$5, NT$10 and NT$20.

Post office personnel said the flying geese stamps printed with face values are worth up to NT$400,000 (US$13,000) apiece.

However, the stamps could be worth up to NT$2 million if there is no value printed on them.

Another set of rarely seen stamps are a series of red revenue stamps (紅印花) printed in the Qing Dynasty.

Ho Huei-ching (何輝慶), assistant professor of the National Taiwan University Graduate Institute of National Development, said these stamps were originally printed as revenue stamps and were supposed to be used by customs officials. However, the Qing dynasty had not formulated its tax policy and the stamps were not used for a while.

Ho said that the Qing Government later decided to use these revenue stamps as regular stamps.

The red revenue stamps on display have the Chinese characters for one dollar (當壹圓) printed in the middle, and one dollar written in English printed at the bottom.

By design, there was supposed to be a period after the one dollar, Ho said, but one of the revenue stamps does not have the period, which makes it unique and the most valuable stamp of all.

Ho said that this one stamp alone could be worth up to NT$80 million.
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