China's Museum of Stamps, located at
Hepingmen (Peace Gate) in Beijing, is a special social history museum. It was
prepared in July 1980 and officially completed in July 1985.
The museum has collected around 200,000
varieties of stamps, foreign and Chinese, around 100 million stamps in total. It
has also collected some relics of postal history, including the first set of
haiguan dalong (huge dragon of the customs) stamps issued in the fourth
year (1878) during the Guangxu reign of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the stamp
of Red Printing with Smaller Characters of Additional One Yuan Stamped issued
in 1897, the first Black Penny stamp in the world issued in 1840 in the Great
Britain, the first set of 46 stamps issued by the Republic of China in 1912 with
the characters of Temporary Neutrality stamped, and the stamp of Red Postage
of Southwestern Jiangxi issued in 1930. All these stamps have become the
valuable historic relics in the world.
The main composition of the Museum
collections is the archives of the postal service run by the customs, the state
postal service and the postal delivery department for issuing stamps since 1878
in the Qing Dynasty and the various kinds of stamps issued by the aggressive
organs of imperialism in China; the archives of the Government of the Northern
Warlords (1912-1927), the Nanjing KMT Regime and the local regimes for issuing
stamps since the first year of the Republic of China in 1912; the archives of
the puppet regimes in the Northeastern China, North China, Mongolia and Xinjiang
for issuing various kinds of stamps; the various kinds of stamps issued during
the period of the Revolutionary War of the Chinese People, by the various
revolutionary base areas and liberated areas since 1930 and part of the
archives; the various kinds of stamps issued by the Ministry of Post and
Telecommunications, the archives, the original postal service maps, the original
engraved plates, the artworks of the well-known domestic artists, and the stamp
information materials collected from all fields or donated to the state by
patriotic personages since the founding of the People's Republic of China; the
stamps obtained from the exchanges with over 200 countries and regions in the
world through the Universal Postal Union and the member nations of the Union;
and the foreign and domestic philatelic books, books of fine arts, books of
historic relics and other important books and information materials related to
postal service and stamps.
The museum has held the basic exhibition of
postal service and stamps, the stamp exhibition of special topics, the
exhibition of philatelists' collections, and the stamp exhibitions of cultural
exchanges with other countries.