Stamp Identifications?

Anyone with access to a catalog of what looks like Japanese airmail willing to help me out with these? Thanks!

Well...one of them says Republic of China, so I'm guessing Chinese?

Still, if anyone does know more about them, it would be appreciated!

They're from Taiwan. Can't help you with catalogue numbers I'm afraid but I recognise some of them from my own collection

Yes, they are all from the Republic of China. Scott #s are

C61
C53
C30(watermarked) or C40 (unwatermarked)
C75
C72
C69
C6

k

Thanks!

Nice stamps Gaff,
esp the last one.

May I ask how you took the images please?
I am curious on how they get an overall orange tone
to them

The Chinese for 'Republic of China' (now Taiwan) is #20013;#33775;#27665;#22269;. (Apologies for the last character: on these stamps it will appear in a slightly different form - but if the first three characters match, reading from left to right, or right to left, it's Republic of China/Taiwan.)

Japan is #26085;#26412; or on older stamps it may appear as #22823;#26085;#26412;#24093;#22269; (again, with the last character in a different, more complex, form). But if you can find #26085;#26412; on the stamp, it's Japan.

How say you this ?

Rodney, it will work up to a point - somewhere after the mid-1950s. At that time, China started on a campaign of reforming its script, and simplified the majority of characters. One character that was affected was #22269;, the character for country in #20013;#22269; or #20013;#33775;#22269;. The version I've used is the simplified version; the version that appears on older Chinese stamps (and is still used on Taiwan and I think Hong Kong) stamps was used prior to the reforms as well.

Thanks Tony,
I cannot read your examples, perhaps I have
a setting awry on my computer.

Actually, Rod, looking at my post now, I see that the characters have come out gibberish - even though they displayed perfectly on my Preview screen.

Anyway, the offending character is the one like a box, with contents inside. The more complex version of the contents in the box is the old version; the simpler version is the new, Simplified version.

Just to clarify a few things (not necessarily corrections)...



Taiwan is the name of an island, and is also the name of a province. The Republic of China (ROC) is the name of a country, whose main province still under its sovereignty is the province of Taiwan. This is ignoring political issues, and just looking at it from a geographical point of view.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) does not recognize the sole sovereignty of the Republic of China, and regards Taiwan as a renegade province. That is the political reality (not taking sides here).

So technically, these are stamps of the "Republic of China", not Taiwan. There ARE some stamps of Taiwan (also known as Formosa) issued during Japanese control. I know a lot of people use ROC and Taiwan interchangeably, but there is a technical difference (not related to political issues).

*******

Rod222 showed a nice pic of Chinese characters from his amazing philatelic archive. But I want to clarify the pic (keeping in mind the clarification I gave above regarding stamps from Taiwan and stamps from the Republic of China).

Upper left characters [Zhong Guo] -- this literally means "middle kingdom/country", and is translated as China; these characters (in their respective traditional/simplified scripts) are present in both PRC and ROC stamps

Upper right characters [Zhong Hua] -- this is a part phrase and cannot really have an exact meaningful translation but is associated with the adjective "chinese"; it is part of the name for ROC; it is NOT the translation for Taiwan -- if you go to Google translate and type Taiwan, you will see two completely different characters for "Taiwan" because it is a different word.

Middle row of characters -- no problems here, very well illustrated; but again, note it is Republic of China, not Taiwan stamps.

Bottom 2 rows of characters -- I would clarify that it is PRC (not China) and ROC (not Taiwan), because neither of these apply to Chinese stamps during the monarchy.

Just my thoughts... just minor technicalities.

k

That is correct. In fact, a few of the earliest provincial (liberated areas) issues could almost pass for ROC stamps if you could not read what the additional script actually says!

Also, as a side note. Much simplified script had long existed, including the simplified box-like character you noted for "country". The difference is that the Communists expanded the simplified script character set by simplifying even more characters, and in some cases, further simplifying already simplified characters. Furthermore, they mandated the change to the simplified characters and incorporated it in the education process.

Just to clarify the matter of simplified Chinese: 'simplified' characters have been around for as long as Chinese has been written cursively, which is to say for an awfully long time. However, there were no firm rules as to how characters were simplified, although there were conventional simplifications. When I was hunting for a suitable logo for my (translation) company, the blindingly obvious choice was the character for 'translation' - which happens to be a rather attractive-looking character in any case.

I borrowed a compendium of specimens of great Chinese calligraphy, and turned to the entries for the character yi, 'translation'. Some examples were so artistically cursive and simplified that I couldn't make out what they were. Some were in an archaic form I didn't much like, but this specimen:



perfectly captured the old, un-simplified version of the character, both artistically and legibly, so I used it. It drives Chinese and Japanese who've only learnt the modern simplified forms of characters to distraction. It's easy to work forwards, from the old complex forms, to the simplified versions, because they were always used; it can be very hard to work backwards from the simplified to the complex forms.

To give an idea of the simplification involved, my company logo took 20 brushstrokes to write; the simplified forms take six in Chinese and 11 in Japanese.

Lots of information. Thanks...

Rod: I took pictures of the stamps with my camera, since I don't have a scanner. I hate using a flash, so the orange tone is the result of ambient light (i.e. the lamp next to me!)...

I see, thanks Gaff.