China - Information On Cancel Please

Not finding much info on the 'net regarding Tayü. What I have found appears to be sketchy. I've found that Tayü is a city in China, in Kiangsi Province. It also appears to be the name of a mountain range in southeastern China, in the eastern part of the Nanling mountain system. I've also found it spelled Tayii. Any help on the name Tayü and the other Chinese characters in the cancel greatly appreciated. Dave

No expertise here, but perhaps TAIYUAN ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiyuan

It is indeed Tayü/Tayu. The Chinese characters at the bottom read that. But that was then. For example, Kiangsi province is Jiangxi province today, though with the same Chinese characters used. For Chinese place names, there have been local pronunciations, the postmark would have been an official PO name with its own transliteration, the name could have been changed at some point, before or after the introduction of Pinyin nationally.

The second character "yü" is not on lists of common characters (12 strokes if anyone cares to dig it up).

in any case, the middle part with the date. Reading right to left:
19th year (of the republic) = 1930
8th month = August
2nd day

EDIT:
Yes, it's in Jianxi/Kiangsi province. Found it in a 1936 map on Wikipedia's Jiangxi article, excerpted below:

Southwest corner of the province. Note Tayuling (now transliterated as Dayuling), the mountain range, is indicated just south of Tayü/Tayu (Dayu today?). You can be the one to correlate this to a modern map.

And this shows the different "yü" character now used for Dayuling, today:


the "ling" character is different, too.

It is unlikely that this stamp was used in Taiwan. China gave Taiwan to Japan in treaty in 1895. Republic of China was found in 1911. I would have extremely hard time to believe that any for the Republic of China stamps would have been used in Taiwan before 1945, the end of WW II. Due to hyper inflation periods in China, the face value of early Republic stamp would be less than the recycled paper value of that stamp by 1945.

kuikka, it's not TAIWAN, it's TAIYUAN, in mainland China.

Apologies, I confused it it to Taoyuan, which is in Taiwan.

Now I'm confused: There is/are Taoyuan both in mainland China and in Taiwan, according to Wikipedia.
hy-brazil spoke of Taiyuan in Jianxi/Kiangsi province. wiki spoke of Taoyuan in Jiangsu. Are they the same? I have no idea.

I'm afraid the discussion got off the tangent. We started to look for alternative locations when it seems that the right location had already been identified. It seems to me that everyone talked about different location.

I looked up "TAYU".
At https://westnab.com/MaxStamps/ChinesePO1.php it lists "Tayu (Dayu) #22823;#24254; 25n23 114e21 Great Yu Mountain" postmark in "KIANGSI – Jiangxi #27743;#35199; River West".

Maybe this site will help too:
http://worldpostmarks.net/HTML%20Co...es/China.htm

(The numbers with # are Kangi characters that can't be shown here)

RobRoy, I never mentioned Taiyuan being in Kiangsi. From what you are carrying on about, it is clear you never read my post at all.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Many thanks to the responses, especially to hy-brasil. Thank you for the translation of the cancel date and I did correlate the map you showed to a modern map. It appears that Tayu is now Dayu as you suspected. Rob Roy, thanks for the two links. Now bookmarked for future reference. Dave

Aren't those your words, hy-brazil?

Chevelle, you are most welcome.

RobRoy, I did indeed say that Tayü/Tayu was in Kiangsi (now Jiangxi) Province. However, you, RobRoy, wrote:

note the word with emphasis added at this time. To keep you from going astray again, I never thought Tayü/Tayu/Dayu was Taiyuan because of the reading of the Chinese characters as I noted. Go ahead and accuse me of editing this out of the post, but I can assure you that that statement that the city was Taiyuan was never made, even before your first post to this thread.
I later wrote:

note the word with emphasis added at this time again. I think your general inattentiveness remains a problem for yourself and others. You may feel otherwise. So, I will leave it at that and let you go back to your search for Taiyuan.

The main goal was to help Chevelle identify his postmark. I think he got it.

EVERYONE, STOP WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND LISTEN: HY-BRAZIL IS RIGHT AND rob roy IS WRONG. rob roy DOESN'T UNDERSTAND CHINEESE, DOESN'T KNOW CHINEESE GEOGRAPHY, DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO COOK AND NEVER GAVE BIRTH TO A CHILD. rob roy BOWS TO HY-BRAZIL. CASE CLOSED.

I tried to find out about the meaning of a cancellation (stamp of the Chinese Imperial Post).

I looked for a directory in respect of Chinese characters - tough I invested some time - this is tricky.

We see in total 10 signs,in four rows.
Row 1 at the top: presumeably may be the town
Row 2 and 3 might be the date
In row 2 I am able to detect the first sign an the right als a "6" and last sign on the left as a "4"
In the third row the last sign on the left might be "1.000"
Row 4 might be the province



I hate to admit it, but here I am clueless.

So, if anybody has some intelligence to share as to the meaning of the postmark, that would be most welcome.

#20808;#24863;#35874;#24744; / Xi#257;n g#462;nxiè nín
which should stand for: thanks in advance

Bendix

This is a nice socked-on-the-nose cancel that is also a little special.

The 2 characters in the top line from right to left indicate the province of Zhejiang (I am using modern English transliteration, not tradition transliteration).

The 2 characters in the bottom line from right to left indicate the district Yuhang, which is located in the city of Hangzhou.

I am assuming (hoping) that you are primarily interested in the cancel location. The dating of the cancel is where this all gets interesting, but complicated. So I can't give you a complete answer there.

The middle 3 columns of 2 characters each is the date. It uses the sexagenary dating system (in general, no longer in use) of the lunar calendar.

The 2 characters of the right column from top to bottom indicate the sexagenary year corresponding to the heavenly stem Yang Fire, which has its lunar equivalent year beginning in the Gregorian years (...1896, 1906, 1916...). By process of elimination based on expected time of issue/use, it is likely the lunar year that spanned 25Jan1906-12Feb1907.

The 2 characters of the middle column from top to bottom indicate the month is a "Leap Month". This is what I find special about the cancel. It's the lunar equivalent of finding a 29Feb cancel.

The 2 characters of the left column from top to bottom indicate the 6th day (of the month).

Unlike the modern Gregorian calendar where the leap is fixed as 29Feb, the leap month in the lunar calendar is not "fixed". It's not a trivial calculation (at least not to me) to determine the Gregorian equivalent of your cancel date. I can only give you the date range of that "best-guess" lunar year 25Jan1906-12Feb1907 and leave it to someone who is adept at doing the calendar conversion. There's probably a website somewhere that can do the conversion for you, but I'll leave that up to you or others to find.