The 30th Asian International Stamp Exhibition is scheduled to open at the Taipei World Trade Center on Friday, featuring valuable stamp collections from 24 members of the Inter-Asia Philatelic Federation.
This will be the fourth time that the nation holds the exhibition, after playing host in 1996, 2005 and 2008.
China is not participating in the exhibition this year because of political reasons, Chinese Taipei Philatelic Society president Chen Yu-an (陳友安) said, but two Chinese stamp collectors are coming to serve as referees for a philatelic competition.
Photo: CNA
Among the 1,000 sets of stamp collections that are to be on display at the exhibition, 20 percent come from collectors in Taiwan.
Chen said the exhibition would feature some rarely seen stamp collections, including “surcharged red revenue” stamps pressed into service in 1897.
According to the organizer, China established a national postal service system in 1896 during the Qing Dynasty. Given the urgent demand for high-value stamps to handle remittances and parcels, a stock of unused three-cent red revenue stamps from the Statistical Department of Customs, Shanghai, were called into service for surcharging into one-dollar stamps in 1897.
Only 32 such stamps remain, and five of them will be on display at the exhibition, Hoo Huei-ching (何輝慶) of the National Taiwan University’s Graduate Institute of National Development said.
Each of these five one-dollar surcharge stamps is valued at NT$30 million (US$962,371), Hoo said.
The exhibition also features an airmail cover from Guangdong to Switzerland via Shayuyung, which was delivered by the secret post office during the Sino-Japanese War.
The organizer said that the war with Japan in World War II cut off China’s communication with the outside world on the eastern coast, but the Chinese postal service managed to set up several secret postal stations, with Shayuyung being one of them.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,