Starting to work with my new Stanley Gibbons Catalogue.

Page 1 Chinese Stamp Collection

OK, so I have been busy going through the first few pages of my Chinese stamp collection. Although I thought it was going to be easy to sort out which stamps are which, (and I must say for the majority of cases it has been) it has not all been plain sailing. What I mean by this is that some of the stamps I have in my album are not listed and to add to this some stamps have been franked with a specific postage mark. 

I have since realised that the specific postal mark refers to the area that the letter was sent from and having hurriedly put Sg numbers next to certain stamps I have quickly had to erase them as they are recognised as a different variant of that stamp in the SG catalogue. This also consequently alters the value!!

I have a couple of examples here, that show how the Surch ultimately effects how the stamp should be recorded.

China / China, People's Republic / China, People's Republic

( Keyword: whistling swans )

  

1950 Nos. 1344/7 and unissued values of Nationalist China (Whistling Swans) surch as T 190.

So here is a $100 surch on a 16 cent stamp. The catalogue values it unused at £0.15 and used is £0.40, not a great deal of money I grant you but it would be easy to mix it up with the Tundra Swans over the globe which retail anywhere from £15.00 to £120...

China / China, People's Republic / China, People's Republic

( SG#: 1429 )

SG1424

SG1429

1950 Surch as T 186. Perf or roul.

Here is the second example from my stamp collection. Below is the complete series. I am not sure what this series is called. If anyone knows please feel free to comment ;-) 

So the steam locomotive used is valued at £20.00 and unused £3.50 but with the additional surch of $500.00 it is revalued at used £0.25 and unused £0.50 respectively. Again a big difference!!

This may of course be old news to the more experienced collector but I think it is useful to illustrate that cataloguing stamps to the novice collector, even when when you think you have all the right tools to hand, can be more difficult than it seems.

According to historian and author @clinttwist, the swan stamps have an iconographical importance that far outweighs their face value, he tweets,

@stampphilatelic more important than increased face value, surcharge on Nationalist swan stamps marked new national identity as PRC.

Again it proves that this journey to decode my grandfather's stamp collection comes with important historical values. Here Chinese philately records important historical turning points in Chinese History, a snapshot of a bygone era neatly recorded on their stamps.

Check out my google + community page, Chinese Philately for more images of my collection and feel free to comment if I have made any mistakes. Please also add your collection and pictures of your favorite stamps, I would love to see what you have and which areas interest you the most!!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/108777950359982601849

and be sure to follow my posts on twitter at https://twitter.com/stampphilatelic for blog and website updates.

Happy stamping!!!