Chinese Stamps not listed in Stanley Gibbons...can anyone help?

Let me present a little bit of background information...

In my last blog I quickly spoke about the confusion I was having whilst trying to identify the stamps in my Chinese album. This led me to to write a quick blog on stamps that have had a surch applied to them, how to identify them using the Stanley Gibbons catalogue and reinforce the notion to other novice stamp collectors, that stamps with a surch applied to them are catalogued differently to the stamps that do not have a surch. Sounds simple now, but took me a number of hours to fathom this out as the surch is often on a different page to the picture of the stamp that is being referenced. 

Check out my last blog here:

http://stampphilatelic.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/starting-to-work-with-my-new-stanley.html?m=1

After some frustrating rubbing out (my advise would be to use a pencil when writing in the SG numbers peeps its easier to erase when you get it wrong!), I went on to re-reference the stamps. 

This however did not solve another stumbling block! I was still unable to find a couple of series of stamps that was not listed in the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. Of course this could either be a good or a bad thing. A good thing because I may have an unlisted series of stamps and thus very valuable. ( I am as ever an eternal optimist!) Or indeed it could be a bad thing as they may be some type of forgery, however I find this entirely unlikely as it was my grandfather who assembled the collection and as he was the one who was stationed on the Chinese border whilst serving with the British Army and working next to the mail room!

So I know that he collected the majority of these stamps first hand. So surely they have to be real, just not listed in this catalogue.

Identifying the stamps

So what do I do now, well I emailed Stanley Gibbons for an answer and a couple of days later I did receive a rather unhelpful reply, which said that the series I was looking at was a series that I had already discounted. So I quickly flicked through the pages of the catalogue to make sure that I had not made an tumultuous error. 

To my surprise, the images of the elusive series of stamps that I had sent through to the experts had in actual fact been incorrectly identified by them, at their end. I know this as what they were suggesting was another series of stamps that I had already correctly identified on another page of my album. 

The elusive series of stamps.

Frustratingly I had to go back to the drawing board.

Scanning down the email there was another suggestion. It said that I may want to purchase another book. Yes another book!! But this one focuses on all Chinese stamps. This reference catalogue is called Part 17 China and funnily enough this is written by the good people at Stanley Gibbons!! Well we all have to make money.

Part 17 China

Anyway I have bitten the bullet and gone to Amazon and found it. It currently is wheeling it's way to my address and hopefully it will reference the sets of stamps that I am looking for. If not then I am going to have to throw it out to a number of the communities on Google plus and hopefully there will be someone on there who will be able to tell me what they are, or a better place to start looking for the answers.

So come on Mr postman, I am waiting!!

Mmmm, I wonder if there will be any stamps affixed to the front of the package which are worth keeping...

Happy stamping!!! And wait out peeps....