Revenues That Lost The Gun Fight ...

Just picked up these two. Ceylon had a fighting chance ... just one big hole. Hong Kong, on the other time, forgot to duck (multiple times).

These guys lost in a knife fight. The fatal wound will never heal.
(China used this system like our money order. These are postal remittance stamps. They were issued in high face values. You buy these stamps, paste them on a special form and mail it to the person as money. The recipient goes to his local post office and redeems it for cash. They are always destroyed by cutting through the middle with a scissor.) These are very rare Silver Yuan overprints of Kweicho (Gueizhou) Province. In July 1949, the Nationalist Government introduced the silver yuan with one silver yuan worth 500 million gold yuan, which it replaced. It was used for a few months on the mainland before the end of the civil war. The National Government lost the Mainland to Mao Ze Dong.

Governments are always afraid that revenue stamps will be reused and they will lose tax money, so putting holes in the stamps is a common concept; some used revenue stamps are impossible to find without them.