2019-01-22 Tue

A 50-year-old stamp collector named Wang Liwei donated 175 old Chinese stamps to the Shanghai History Museum recently. There were a total of 42 sets of stamps issued by the People’s Republic of China, printed between October 1949 and February 1955. The donation was made to mark China’s 70th anniversary.

The first set of stamps was issued on 8th October 1949 to commemorate the first plenary session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. The stamps bore very high denominations as the country was dealing with high inflation at that time. A new currency system was introduced in 1955, which was worth 1/10,000 the value of the older counterpart. These stamps were issued when China’s economy was slowly stabilising. The museum earlier had only those stamps which were issued before new China was founded. Many of these old Chinese stamps were printed in Shanghai at local printing houses like Shanghai Commercial Press and the Shanghai No. 1 Printing Factory. Shanghai is also the city which promoted Chinese Philately in the 1920s.

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