Chinese Cover Questions.

Hi guys....Take a look at this Chinese cover (Not in the best of shape)...A few questions come you in my mind.

1) Why would there be so many cancels if it is sent directly to Montreal Canada from Chungking, China....It has a cancel from..
A) Vancouver, Canada
B) Montreal, Canada
C) Shanghai, China
D0 And two more Chinese cancels I can not make out.





2) What is this cancel..?




3) Is this a registered mail stamp...?




Thanks for any help.
Roert

1. It did not go direct flight. I only saw one other Chinese cancel which is Dongchuan (I don't know the old spelling). So Chungking => Dongchuan => Shanghai => Vancouver => Montreal.

2. short for registered airmail

3. it is only a registration label

k

It's a registered cover thus as the cover passed from post office to post office it received a receiving postmark.

I don't know about #2, but #3 is a registered mail label.

Thanks for the info guys..Appreciate it.

Robert

Sorry, I mistyped one of the city names. It should be Dongchuan, not Guangdong. I need to start rotating the pictures when the postmarks are upside-down. I have correct it in my earlier post...

The stamps are cancelled at Dongchuan/Tung-chuan, which is in fact near Kunming. So it appears the cover was put in the post at Dongchuan, which apparently wasn't able to register the cover, flown up to Chongqing/Chungking, where it was registered, and then sent on via Shanghai.

Of course, it's wildly improbable that there were any direct flights from Chungking to Montreal in 1948 ...

Looking back at the postmark on the stamp, I will agree with tonymacg. I was debating about this, but decided on Chungking as the original posting location because of the return address and the registration label. Then assumed the odd circuitous route was taken because of fighting. However, Tony's explanation makes more sense, especially given the TungChuan cancel on the stamps.

Registered mail is treated specially compared to ordinary mail. In 1882 the Universal Postal Union began requiring that international registered mail matter bear a label or impression with a capital letter R in Roman text. When you pay extra for registered mail treatment of a letter or package you are buying a highly secure treatment of your mail that is controlled by each postal authority along its route at each major transfer point. The registration number that is on the registration label is what postal authorities use for this controlled internal tracking. Registration labels are not any kind of stamp, they are just an internal post office tracking label. There is a very small number of collectors who collect registration labels so most of them are not in much demand.

Dear khi,

My guess is, as proposed by Tony, this cover was posted at Dongchuan. The Dongchuan cancel could be read as "DongChuan / 37 July 21 17 / ChungKing (Area)(?) ". The "37" is "the 37th year in Minguo calendar" and is 1948; July 21st quite obvious, and I suspect that "17" means "17 o'clock". The roman datestamp of Chungking says "21 7.48 | 24", which suggests that the receipt time was "24 o'clock", July 21st. So Dongchuan cancel applied before the Chungking, thus Dongchuan the starting point.

A conjecture on Dongchuan. The bottom inscription of the Dongchuan datestamp indeed says "ChungKing" with a rather blur small character which might be "area", and this may suggest that DongChuan (TongChuan) is indeed a place in the vicinity of Chungking, and not the Dongchuan/Tongchuan near Kunming, Yunnan which is quite far away (a couple of hundred kilometers) from Chungking. It is hard to say but it seems to be quite unrealistic that the postal system at those days was so well organized such that a posted letter be transferred by couple of hundred km during the night... To confirm this conjecture we need to check the detailed post office location at Chungking at that time, so any comments from China experts are welcome.

Another interesting discovery; the "27" of Montreal P.O. is inverted :-).



Cheers, unechan @ Osaka, Japan

Oops, I think I made a mistake in interpreting the "DongChuan" cancel;

According to the literature "History of Chinese Postal System Development" (available on Google Books), p.414, line 1, there was two administration office in Sichuan (Szechwan), i.e. Dongchuan (Chungking) and Xichuan (Chengdu). (Dongchuan = East River, Xichuan = West River). So the Dongchuan/Chungking postmark may be the postmark of Chungking itself. Here's the captured image of the literature (with annotations by unechan);



I also found another example bearing this postmark, and also having the sender's address of Chungking here;

http://ur0.link/oTZx

Still no clue for the small character at the bottom, but seems getting close to the fact...

Cheers, unechan @Osaka, Japan