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.
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