The cancel on top of the postage reads: Yi Prefecture (Shandong), The other one (over where the sender's address) reads: Jiaozhou City I am not sure which one belongs to the sender and which one to the receiver.
Thank you, JFF! On the back side of this card is 2x handwritten name of the place, where is this card has been actually written by the sender, but all on the old German script... hard to decipher. Particularly, I am unable to decipher first couple (2 or 3) letters from the name od the town, and the rest is ***chowfou... the very first letter is most probably F, or possibly H, so, the name of the town should be F**chowfou or, less probably, H**chowfou. Any clue?
The place name as written appears to be Ttschowfou, which could be a short way of writing Tschingtschoufu, which had a significant German presence beginning in 1903.
The official postal reading in 1904 was: Ichow. The lunar date in this marking is 5th month 13th day. Nobody could use the post WWII pinyin spelling back in 1904. It did not exist.
The german senders writing was "Itschowfou", which was the german spelling back then of: Ichowfu.
Transit marks, blue bilingual mark reads "Kiaochow", and the inland style lunar dater SE of it is also Kiaochow. The lunar dater shows the date of 5th month 15th day. At top left is a second strike of the Kiaochow lunar dater same dates, probably because the first strike was considered unclear.
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