When it comes to mail, you can’t just be a taker, you gotta be a giver too, and both roles are fine by me. So the other day when I was at the post office sending some of my stuff to myself, and coating the box with the required postage stamps, I remembered just how awesome those diminutive collectibles are. The PRC is no different from any other country in that it has a long history of stamps, and what better way to look at how a country tries to represent itself than through those thumbnail sized pictures.

I set out on a mission to acquire a small collection of PRC stamps from years past. My first foray to the obvious destination of the post office turned out to be unsurprisingly useless. There, they only sell current stamps used for postage, or recently printed collector sets in ludicrous display cases that outweighed the face value of the stamps by several orders of galactic magnitude.

After further trolling around the internets I managed to locate a small back alley type area off of Qingdao’s cultural street (昌乐路). For those out of the loop, many Chinese cities have these cultural streets, or districts that are filled with stores selling reproductions of classic art, giant posters of grass script Chinese poetry, and weird jade formations that look like translucent green feces. It was an easy to miss back alley, but once I ventured past the gates, there was a whole swarm of shops selling eclectic junk like old coins, stamps, bank notes, and magical scrolls for summoning drunken bureaucrats.

I tried to get a selection of stamps spanning the years since the dawn of the PRC. From the time of Mao’s witch hunts for landlords and merchants, to the present days of the CPC’s witch hunts for proletariat and porno, my objective was to see how China pictured itself during different generations. Collecting the physical stamps I could care less about. What I was after was the design and the images, so I scanned them all high rez style and put them here for everyone to ogle over.

1954 “Everyone Loves Communism” （中华人民共和国第一届全国人民代表大会）

This is the oldest stamp I bought, fresh from 1954. This perfect example of communist art has it all, red ink , the cheering masses, industrious factories, and a humongous hydroelectric dam. All this for a bargain face value of 800 Yuan. Assuming that was the price today, the average farmer could easily afford to send one letter, and then spend the rest of the month starving to death. So you better recognize that 1954 had inflation like a blow up doll. Also less obvious is the Chinese writing using traditional characters, instead of the simplified ones that didn’t get shoved down everyone’s throat until a few years after this stamp was made.

1957-59 “I’m in yur reactor, steelin yur secrets”
(武汉长江大桥，原子反应堆，回旋加速器 and unnamed pinko industrial scene)

I liked the drawing style of the first three stamps above, even though only two of them are from the same series, they all comically feature things developed in China with significant help from the Soviets. The Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, atomic reactors, particle accelerators, all from Russia with love of course. I’d like to know what the average Chinese farmer would’ve thought of the particle accelerator and reactor stamps at the time. I mean, back then they wouldn’t even be able to contemplate what a particle is, yet alone a machine that accelerates the fuckin things. Hell, I didn’t even know what they were without looking at the titles (ok ok, I didn’t even know what they were after reading the titles, I had to google that shit). Going into the peasant mindset (aka normal everyday thinking for me), I would have to say the reactor looks like one bitchin mantou oven, and the particle accelerator looks like someone let the engineers drink too much rice wine again. As for the last stamp with all the lovely smokestacks, again I remind you, that perpetual blanket of smog that shrouds most of Asia, it’s been something they’ve been working on there for a while now.

Filed under: dragons