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!!!

New books arrived from Amazon!!!

Stanley Gibbons Stamps of the World 2015.

Well look what has arrived today!!! I am very excited indeed to own my first copy of the simplified Stanley Gibbons reference series of books - 2015. 

It is, however the simplified catalogue but for the moment this seems more than enough reference material to enable me to start to identify the stamps in my Chinese collection. 

So having flipped straight to the Chinese section, I am more than pleased to see that there are a multitude of stamps that match the ones I have. Although what is immediately evident is that the Stanley Gibbons arranges its stamps in not only year order but also by China's Provinces. So immediately the task becomes ever more daunting. What I mean by this is that because my grandfather assembled the collection, 

I now wonder whether he ordered the album by date or by Province. Well we shall have to see!! But before then it may be useful to try to understand how and why these provinces came into existence and why the Stanley Gibbons catalogue arranges its stamps this way!

Motto

全世界無產階級和被壓迫的民族聯合起來  (a slogan for the communists)
"Workers of the world, unite!"

After a quick search, it is immediately obvious that there is a good deal of fascinating history going on here. It is quite easy to forget that China was not always a communist constitution. For those who want to read more about the history of China and how it came to be the way it is today, I have managed to track down a number of articles on Wikipedia. A snap shot of the Republic of China and dates is given below but the full article can be found by clicking the link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_%281912%E2%80%9349%29

The Republic of China (traditional Chinese: 中華民國; simplified Chinese: 中华民国; pinyin: Zhōnghuá Mínguó; Wade–Giles:Chung¹-hua² Min²-kuo²) was the East Asian state that governed the present-day territories of China, Mongolia and Taiwan at differing times between 1912 and 1949. As an era of Chinese history, it was preceded by the last imperial dynasty of China, the Qing dynasty. Its end was marked by the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, which saw the division of the state. The losing Kuomintang retreated to the island of Taiwan, which it continued to call the "Republic of China", today more commonly known as Taiwan. The winning Communist Party of China controlled the remaining territory on the mainland, and there founded the People's Republic of China, more commonly known as China. 

Just flicking through the China section of the Stanley Gibbons catalogue it is easy to see that the above segregation of an entire country for more than 40 years, helped to create what is one of the most amazing postage stamp biographies in the world This is of course owing in part to the different personalities running their own share of China and also as an advertisement for their political ideology. My album shows stamps which demonstrate an alliance to Russia. Some depict Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, and others show them alongside or shaking hands with Mao Tse-Tung.

One-yuan bill, with Lenin's image in the center

As I have learned these stamps point to ones which were produced in the Chinese Soviet Republic, which existed as an unrecognizable state between the dates 1931-1937. You can access a potted history of the Chinese Soviet Republic via the link below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Soviet_Republic

I am not too sure as yet but I think that this may refer to the areas that produced the People's Post, but a little bit more research needed here until I can confirm this.

So I am off to assign the unique Stanley Gibbons reference number to each of my stamps on page one, this in itself may take a little time and when I have done this I shall post a picture of page one of my collection along with their SG number. We shall also see what area the stamp originated from and its current valuation where applicable.

Wish me luck!!!

Wikipedia: Postage stamps and postal history of China

 Postage stamps and postal history of China

So while I look for the reference books on amazon, I just wanted to post a little information that I found on Wikipedia. They have potted history of Chinese postal stamp history and the names of the key personalities that appear on them which in turn starts to fill in a couple of the gaps. Please follow the link below for some very interesting reading!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_history_of_China

having found this there are multiple links that you can follow depending on your interests and time. I am going to try and add the Wikipedia gadget to the blog so that we can search and read articles at ease.

Happy reading!!!

Identifying page one of my Chinese stamp collection.

Ok peeps, so having cropped and posted page one of my Chinese stamp collection, I have set about the arduous task of trying to identify the stamps on the page. Like many amateur philatelists I have turned to google to give me some quick answers and having done so have been almost over whelmed by the scope and scale of the task. What I mean is that there is literally thousands of Chinese stamps and here I am searching for a mere handful!!! 

Undeterred I came across a number of useful websites, www.stanleygibbons.com, www.sandafayre.com and www.colnext.com/en/stamps which has a directory of stamps by country, including China. This is extremely useful and a start but having read the Stanley Gibbons website it is clear to me that they seem to be the tour de force of the stamp world, what I mean by this is that they have been in existence since 1856 as an auction house specializing in buying and selling stamps. They also sell catalogs that reference each stamp by country with a price guide. While they look expensive to buy it seems logical to try to get my hands on a copy rather than aimlessly searching the Internet and hoping to match my stamp. So here I go off to amazon to check out some prices and hopefully order some new reference books.

Wish me luck!!

175 years of the Penny Black

Page 1 of China

...Here is the first page of my China album. 

I have photographed them, cropped them and added them to the blog. As detailed as they are I am unsure of what the Chinese characters mean, some are franked and so I assume they will have been sent from a particular post office from within China. So I am off to google to try to find out what the stamp series is called, when they were made and if there is any guide to their value.... wish me luck.....