1913 Chinese Revenue Stamp With Mysterious Overprint

I'm a big fan of the 1913 series of Chinese revenue stamps depicting the Great Wall. Not only is it a great design, the stamps come in a wide variety of shades and usually carry fascinating overprints. More by accident than design, I have ended up owning five of them. Unfortunately, they're not listed in my Gibbons China catalogue and so I have no idea what they are or what they're worth.

The one pictured below is to me the most interesting of the bunch. In addition to Chinese inscriptions, the overprint contains - in a font I've never seen before - an English word ('Issued') and some very interesting squiggles that could conceivably be someone's initials but probably aren't. I'd love to know what it is. Can anyone help?



Detail:

The first two lines of the Chinese overprint read 'Ministry of Finance/Canton Office', but I can't make out the whole of the third line. It's probably too much to hope that it would solve the mystery of the English squiggle, but if you could post a good scan of the third line, you never know your luck.

Post deleted.

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. It's the far left line that I can't make out all of. A couple of characters are quite readable, but a couple aren't, and I can't make sense of what I can read.

Tonymacg, I'm impressed you can read it at all!

This is the line you asked for:

After all that build-up, I'm sorry to have to disappoint. That last line appears to be a '(something)-ho (or 'River') Branch'. Doesn't shed any light that I can see on the initials under 'Issued'.

Assuming that they are initials, and that there are three of them, they could well be those of a Chinese name. What that name might be is anyone's guess, I'm afraid. Trying to run down the name of a Finance Ministry Official in some branch in Canton a century or so ago ...

It's striking that the writing is in English, though.

On an official Chinese overprint!

I haven't seen anything like this before. There has to be a very interesting story behind it.

As the stamp is overprinted for Canton, I'd suspect a Hong Kong connection. Perhaps one of the great trading companies like Jardine Mathieson, or perhaps the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. The 'Issued + initials' might be an internal security control of some sort. Pure guesses, of course!

tonymacg, here are three others with Chinese overprints. If you're able to read them for me I'd greatly appreciate it.







My only other 1913 revenue is a 50c without overprint.

Not wanting to put you off or anything

If this great wall belongs to the 1913 overprint set
(which I think it does)

There may be over 20,000 different overprints

Time to get collecting

I'm afraid I can't give you a complete answer, jimjamtwo, but such as I can, here it is:

Stamp 1: Overprinted 'Chihli' - the old name name for Hopei/Hebei Province, which used to include Peking/Beijing
Stamp 2: Chihli again, with an additional overprint below, in which I can't make out the first (right-hand) character
Stamp 3: Right-hand side: 'Stamp Duty'; centre: Republican Government Ministry of Finance; left hand side: 'Humei' branch. I'm not sure where this is, but the 'Hu' might refer to Hupei (Hubei) or Hunan Province.

Thanks, tonymacg!

rod222, I won't be collecting any more. I'm getting out of Chinese stamps and concentrating my collecting mainly on Europe. Most of my Chinese stamps are ending up on ebay, unless perhaps someone here expresses interest first.

However, I think I'll hold on to the one with the English inscription, as it seems rather too special to jettison.

You should do well then JimJam,
Chinese stamps are in demand currently.

ross222, the boom in Chinese stamps is definitely not over yet, so I'm doing quite well.

I'd encourage anyone just learning about stamps to start with Chinese stamps because if ever you decide to sell them you have a very high expectation of getting your money back or even making a modest profit.