Help Identify Country Of This Asian Stamp

I like to buy foreign mixtures and figure out most of the stamps but I am unsure about country for this one:



Thank you in advance for any help.

China, but I don't know what number. The first character on the left with the vertical line though it is only on Chinese stamps.

PRC - Issued on Sep 25, 1958, Scott 389 - Lilac Rose.

Thanks for the information

While I am confident that cstamps has correctly identified this stamp, and that revcollector's rule-of-thumb is correct, I will caution the rest of you that individual characters migrated between neighboring languages and, worse for someone trying to learn, say, Japanese after learning Chinese, their meanings in their respective languages are completely independent of one another.

Think rattle snake & daisy, to borrow from the late Mr Crichton.

Thus the rule: In Asia, a single character does not always a country-of-origin make.

Pretty stamp.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I'm sorry ikeyPikey but you're quite wrong about Chinese and Japanese. The great majority of characters used in Japanese have identical or very similar meanings to those of the Chinese characters.

To take a very simple example, the inscription on the Chinese stamp above would be perfectly intelligible to a Japanese-speaker, making allowances for the simplified form of the fifth character:



means exactly the same in Japanese as it does in Chinese.

The first character in the word for 'China'



is certainly helpful in identifying Chinese stamps. However, it's also a common Japanese character, having exactly the same meaning as in Chinese. It's one of the characters Japanese school children learn in their first year at school.

Just beware of it in postmarks. For example, just about every large Japanese has a 'Central'



Ward. And the 'Central' is also perfectly intelligible, as 'central', in Chinese.