1934 China Cover With Shanghai Wavy Bar Cancel

I have a bunch of covers and post cards from China BEFORE they became two Chinas, PRC and ROC. All of them are hand-cancelled, except for the cover scanned below, which has a wavy bar and date/die circle Shanghai cancellation. I am fairly sure this is a machine cancel, but it could be a roller cancel, I am not sure. I searched the SCF knowledge archive, and found two other examples, shown in these links:

https://goscf.com/t/54180

https://goscf.com/t/54190

These examples are different from the one on my cover. Is mine a machine cancel? Does anyone have other covers like this, showing examples of China wavy bar cancels, they can share here.

Discussion welcome,

Linus

(Nothing to show on the back)

I agree that the cancels in the two linked threads are hand-held roller cancels. (Note multiple impressions at angles to each other.)

I agree that your cover is a machine cancel. (Note printing parallel to the top edge of the cover.)

John

Thanks for the confirmation. I didn't think the cancels in the two linked threads were machine cancels and were hand-held roller cancels.

By no means am I saying this cover is rare, but you do not see machine cancels on China covers as much as other countries. You see way more hand cancels. I have never seen an old Chinese machine-slogan cancel. Perhaps this was a bulk mailing by a company, and they ran a bunch of the same thing through the machine, as there is no return address. Perhaps collectors of years ago did not save covers like this and soaked the stamps. China covers can have lots of stamps on them, high, low, on the front, on the back, all over the place. Perhaps it did not make sense to run mail through a machine and miss cancelling stamps when labor was cheap in China. Just random thoughts, conjecture only.

You may see this machine cancel on your used China stamps, partially, but now you can see what the whole cancel looked like on this cover.

And when you now search SCF for "China machine cancel," this thread will come up. Perhaps others will add more examples to it.

Linus

Here is an abstract of an article about your addressee, with additional notes below the abstract.

https://link.springer.com/article/1...8-015-9654-2

The full article would be available on jstor for those that have access...

Cjd - Thanks for that link. I had earlier tried searching on "World Letters" and came up with nothing.

Very interesting article about the World Letters program. My 1934 China cover was mailed early in the history of that organization. Now I wish it had a return address, so I could know who sent it. Oh well...

Much appreciated,
Linus

We likely can't know who mailed it, but one possibility, gleaned from the notes below the abstract, is that they mailed them to themselves, for further forwarding to the subscribers. Guessing, only, of course. (A fair reading of the note is that those catch-up letters were mailed to late subscribers, earlier in the Grand Tour than your cover.)

It could explain blowing through a bunch of covers with a machine cancel? Or not.