My Mystery Stamp - Can Someone Identify This Stamp?

I am having difficulty with stamps that do not use our alphabet, I am not able to read them and have not learned to recognize any of them except Japan (lived there for 2 years a long time ago).

Here is a stamp that I have been looking for for a few days now but cannot find, I have looked in china and tibet, of course I could have overlooked something while looking - this looks chinese to me, have been through china 3 times and am not locating it:



In the meantime I have at least figured out that each stamp has a basic format, and they overlay the art on the stamp with the format, has taken me time to realize that I need to look for the format and not the art in the catalog.

Thanks to anyone that can help me with this stamp - I do not think it is a valuable stamp, I would just like to identify it for peace of mind so to speak.

And if anyone has any tips on how to handle the stamps with foreign alphabets I would appreciate hearing them!

Thanks, Julie

Taiwan, 31 Oct 1956.

For stamps without recognizable text, I usually do a reverse Google image search.

Wow PostmasterGS, you are fast! I also do reverse image searches when looking for stamps I can't find, I did not see any like this one - but of course I was focused on china, didn't think of Taiwan. I am curious, did you find it by looking at the scott catalog or by using the google image search? I am not finding it either way, but of course I did not look at Taiwan. Many thanks for locating this stamp for me.

A reverse Google image search led to this page, which I then ran through Google Translate.

OK PostmasterGS, I can tell I am missing something. I go to google images and key in "china + postage stamp" and I get a page of images with English text. Are you changing the google country to china or asia? I did do a search for "postage stamp + asia" too, did not get any chinese pages back that I know of, however I could have overlooked them as I wasn't paying attention to that aspect of the search results.

Any further information about your search method would be helpful if you are up to divulging it. Thank you so much for your help this morning. :)

You need to do a Google Image search, not a Google text search.

To do that, go to Google Images and click on the little camera icon in the search block. This will pop-up a window that allows you to either provide a hyperlink to the image (if on the Internet) or upload the image from a file. Then click search.

At the bottom of the results page you should see something like this:

If you use Chrome as your browser, you can also right click the image. "Search Google for Image" will be one of the options on the menu.

Hi Julie,

When I saw this stamp my first thought was Taiwan (ROC) and that was for several reasons:

1. The script looks Chinese.
2. It has the character for China (a square with a vertical line through the middle).
3. The characters are complicated (dense with lots of strokes) showing it's the traditional Chinese script (as used in Taiwan) rather than the Simplified script (as used in mainland China).

I then looked it up and found it before realising that PostmasterGS had already posted the answer by a more efficient method! At least we found the same stamp.

I'd like to be able to say I recognised Chiang Kai-Shek but I didn't (and I still don't see the likeness)

Thank you so much for the information everyone. I did the image search from the images page by clicking on the camera and uploading the same image that I uploaded at the beginning of this thread. Found the same page that PostmasterGS did - thank you so much for explaining this to me, I have never had occasion to do an image search before, of course it is different than a text search, my faux pas.

I use the Opera browser, last time I used chrome it was unwieldy, a resource hog, same for firefox. Maybe they have improved these applications by now, it has been a couple of years since I switched away.

Thanks for all the help

It is later in the day here, evening time, and I am going over this one more time as I had to run off earlier today before I had finished to run some errands.

So now, looking over this I tried to look up this stamp in the Scott catalog. I am looking under the Republic of China and have found the stamp that I believe PostmasterSC and nigelc were referring to, specifically:

Republic of China Sc#1144 A122 40c carmine rose

Here is what is bothering me about this identification - if indeed this is the stamp referred to earlier in the thread- it is the only one with a date of Oct 1956 for 40c. The "art" designation of "A122" is a different picture of Chaing Kai-shek, not this one. And, the denomination of 40c is on the bottom right on this stamp, none of the stamps in this set is formatted this way - the denominations on the stamps shown are elsewhere on the stamp, none are on the bottom right. The description I am seeing for the 40c stamp issued in Taiwan in Oct 1956 is different than the stamp I posted.

Can someone help me out with this, I am of course, throughly confused about where to find this stamp at this point. I am continuing to look for this stamp, if someone finds it I would appreciate knowing.

Thanks,
Julie

Julie, try it this way. Go to http://stampworld.com and find Taiwan in the catalogue. Under 1956, October 31 your stamp is listed and shown as the second one in a set of 6

Peter

Thank you so much Peter, I could not find the stamp on stamp world, got to the page of stamps for Taiwan, tried to go to page 2 (said there were more pages) and it would not go past page one - not sure what that was all about, but I tried and tried, couldn't get it to go anywhere but page 1. So, I left the site and went here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Taiwan-the...AOSwHUhaB6Rn

I am still a bit confused about the Scott catalog, but I suppose this statement copied from the section covering this set of stamps covers the situation:




I am learning to pay attention to their little notes, they have solved more than one mystery for me over the past few days.

Thanks,
Julie

I have developed a smartphone app for cases just like this, I will share it with you once I have the appropriate number of posts :)

Kirk, you simply right click the image on your hard drive to open with Chrome and then do the image search.

I think on Stampworld, you have to make an account to get past the first page. That's what I did and it worked. Otherwise, I'm not really sure.