Preface II

Nearly twenty years ago, I was commissioned to author the First Volume of The History of Chinese Postage Stamps, as requested by the Shanghai Posts and Telecommunications Administration. Based on the monographs of the Customs' files, which might be located without too much difficulty at the time, namely the Selected Archives of Tientsin Customs Post in Late Qing Dynasty, Postal History of Tientsin, Vol. I, and Archives of China's Imperial Maritime Customs: Confidential Corre-spondence between Robert Hart and James Duncan Campbell, 18741907, I was preliminarily able to restore some of the relevant historical facts, as associated with the preparations carried out by the Customs between 1877 and 1878, for printing China's first set of stamps which have been called the Large Dragon stamps. I used the word “preliminarily” in my previous sentence because there were still some links missing in this long historical chain of facts. The “De La Rue's long report”, which should have been carefully read by Rob-ert Hart and Gustav Detring, was surely one of the missing links. Under limited time and resources, I could then pursue no further but leave with regrets.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Zhao Yue informed me that he had discovered a batch of documents at the Postal Museum, Lon-don, which included a De La Rue's letter on specific topics, dated June 8, 1877, addressed to the Maritime Customs of Qing, along with other related papers. He would have these documents translat-ed and then published. Furthermore, he asked me whether I might help reviewing the monograph. Without the slightest hesitation, I, in fact, could scarcely wait to promise. There is nothing more to please the researchers in literary and history than to furnish them with newly discovered documents for acquiring further knowledge. I just felt all excited to think of learning the unknown historical facts by unveiling the dust sealed archives.

After reading the replies of Thomas De La Rue & Co. to the three questions raised by the Imperial Customs of Qing, I felt deeply that their attitudes were prudent; their descriptions were detailed and they possessed professional consciousness. Lastly, but surely, the replies also implied the intention of promoting their core business. As for the stamp production processes practiced in 1870s, I consider there should be at least three aspects worthy of attention.

The first is the printing process. In the nineteenth century, the printing technology was very well developed in the Occident. As the most renowned printing house in Great Britain, Thomas De La Rue & Co. undoubtedly should be standing at the leading edge of technology. The Company provided information on four different systems, namely the intaglio, lithographic, embossing and surface printing processes. These four processes should have represented the then mainstream technologies employed for printing stamps. Unex-pectedly, De La Rue stated the followings, “all these considerations have led us to discard the three processes which we have discussed above in favour of the improved surface stamp printing process which we succeeded in perfecting some thirty years ago, .…This process is in fact now employed for almost all the stamps which we manufacture, and it enables us to produce stamps which are secure against forgery and are proof against being fraudulently cleaned and used a second time.” Nonetheless, the details of the surface printing process were not clearly described in the letter. This might be due to the electrotyping process was more widely used in Europe during the period, which could replicate the printing plates by means of elec-trolysis. Moreover, the characteristic feature of electrotyping process was to produce replicas with high precision conveniently. In 1870s, Japan introduced the technology to facilitate the stamp production. For those who are interested, please refer to Section 3 in the Volume II of The History of Chinese Postage Stamps.

The second is the anti-forgery of stamps. The anti-coun-terfeiting of banknotes and negotiable securities have been paid tremendous attentions by governments and printing organizations globally. As we may have known, the “Coiling Dragon” and “Junk” Issues were released by the Chinese Imperial Post and Republican Post, respectively. Both Issues were produced in London, using the intaglio printing process, as well as taking anti-forgery into chief consideration. The banknotes of the Ta-Ching Government Bank were printed by the intaglio process, and the printing process imported by the Printing Bureau of the Imperial Department of Treasury was intaglio, as well. Ironically, De La Rue informed us that stamps printed by the intaglio process might be counterfeited or even altered easily. Furthermore, the counterfeiting and fraudulent processes were explained in excessive details. To my humble knowl-edge, I must point out the level of complexity involved in counter-feiting process of this sort just could not be manipulated by normal human beings. Hence, we may not rule out the possibility that De La Rue was trying to promote its own printing process by deliberately downgrading the advantages of intaglio, instead. On the other hand, the subsequent influence on the Imperial Customs officials, after reading this detailed report on the forgery means, may likely be raised for further discussions. In the latter days, the Inspector General Robert Hart and Chief Commissioner Henry C. J. Kopsch indeed placed special emphases on the subject of anti-forgery, as the Chinese Imperial Post decided to have one of the stamp issues printed in Japan.

The last is the introduction of printing materials, especially the printing inks, and equipment. The De La Rue's report contained comprehensive descriptions on a few types of inks used for stamp printing, with the illustrations of related specimens, and that was im-pressive. Some years later, the Imperial Customs Post presided over the production of the Small Dragon Issue in which the printing inks comprising of water soluble pigments might have been employed. Whether this kind of inks was, in any manner, related to the fugitive inks, as strongly recommended by De La Rue, would likely to be the clue for further study. In 1886, Gustav Detring started to acquire printing equipment and then founded the English newspaper, The Chinese Times, in Tianjin. He later imported the English typing and composing machine for setting up the Tientsin Printing Company. Was there any possible correlation between his career opportunities and De La Rue's opinions on printing machineries? All in all, this may again be treated as a topic for further research.

To thoroughly understand the contents of De La Rue's Ar-chives, I have consulted a few historical records on modern Chinese printing. Subsequently, this leads to the formation of a new concept on cliché replication for the Large Dragon stamps. When I was writing the Volumes I and II of The History of Chinese Postage Stamps, I considered the electrotyping technology was introduced to China in the early twentieth century, and the Commercial Press ought to be the first printing house to adopt the process. Now I know, the American Presbyterian Mission Press of Shanghai had employed the process to replicate its printing plates at least before 1871. For this occasion, it was reported as follows:

There was this copper printing plate which was not formed by arranging words made of copper. All words were actually casted to yield one complete copper printing plate. The process was started by using words made of lead as dies. These cubic dies of lead were arranged as required by the typesetting, which were then impressed on the surface of a wax plate. The stencil was dusted by the black lead powders, which was positioned face-to-face with a copper plate, and both were immersed in the electrolysis trough. The copper was electrified and absorbed by the wax plate which in turn formed the copper printing plate. The words appeared on the copper plate were solid and exquisite and far better than those on the wooden plates.

Could there be a possibility that the same electrotyping process was used for producing the Large Dragon stamps?

In 1905, Juan Mencarini “discovered three blocks of copper dies in a metal cabinet at the Statistical Department,….Each block consisted of four individual pieces of copper die.” Allegedly, “these individual copper dies were engraved by local craftsmen.” We should have known by now, each denomination of the Large Dragon Issue had its own master die which was replicated to produce the clichés subsequently. Then, the clichés were arranged to form the printing plate. However, the master dies of the Large Dragons have never been reported, and a proof of the One-Candarin is the only item known to exist. Due to the lack of related documents, the researchers have been expressing different opinions on the replica-tion process adopted for producing the clichés, and the consensus is yet to be reached. According to the existing literatures, we may conclude the Printing Office of Statistical Department had neither the master dies nor the skill for replicating the clichés. Therefore, if the clichés were constantly damaged, the problem could seemingly be solved by reducing the number of stamps in a full sheet or even by releasing new issues. By assuming the Statistical Department did need to entrust the production of dies of the Large Dragons to some external organizations, then, the employment of electrotyping pro-cess, as mentioned previously, might stand for a possible choice, as the technical characteristics of the process shared a few similarities with the Large Dragons. Surely, this is only a conjecture before the discovery of some solid evidences.

After going through some historical records, I may also have a new clue with regard to the designer of the Large Dragons. It was stated in The Printing Chronicles of The Beijing Industrial Chronicles:

The first set of Chinese stamps were the Large Dragons which were issued in Tianjin by the Chinese Im-perial Customs Post Office1 in July of 1878. The task of designing and drawing this set of three stamps, under the auspices of the Chinese Imperial Customs Post Office, was undertaken by an aged Chinese craftsman, nicknamed“Limner Li”. He used the “nine-rectangle-grid” to estab-lish the border frames, along with an Ipomoea Cairica, composing the auspicious scene of a dragon playing with a pearl in cloud, as the central design.

As the Chronicles do not furnish the origin of this piece of information, we thus are in no manners to evaluate its importance. However, the citations of “Chinese Imperial Customs Post Office” in the above statement were mistakenly presented, and there was, in fact, no such organization with the title during the period. The postal service initially offered by the Imperial Customs and overseen by Detring was only a trial operation. In 1877, Detring was busy preparing for China's participation in the Exposition Universelle de Paris. He submitted “various sketches of postage stamps” to Hart. This might also imply Detring should have hired Chinese craftsmen to handle the designs and productions of the Chinese exhibits, and one of the craftsmen could probably be responsible for providing stamp design sketches with distinguishing Chinese cultural features. There was an annotation in a book, published in 1937, on a col-lection of Customs documents, which claimed the Large Dragon stamps were designed by a Chinese painter. There seemed to be little discrepancy between the Chinese painter and an aged Chinese craftsman, known as “Limner Li”.

This volume of translated works by Zhao Yue reminds us of the essentiality of searching overseas for related documents on Chinese Post and its issued stamps. Due to our special historical circum-stances, quite a few literatures, recording the important figures and events of modern time China, are presently kept in the archives, museums and libraries abroad. As an example, the printed matters of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace were largely destroyed by the Qing Government, and there was almost nothing left on the Chinese soil. In the 30s of 20th century, two Chinese scholars, Xiao Yishan and Wang Chongmin, were successively sent overseas by the government for conducting a survey. They were able to collect a handsome amount of the official publications of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom from the Department of Asia at British Museum. After returning to China, they reorganized the finds and had them published. This enabled the researchers to read and study these invaluable literatures and, hence, greatly promoted the progresses of researches in the related areas. Just about everyone thought the literatures related to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom should have been drained to the limit in Great Britain. However, another Chinese scholar, Wang Qingcheng, unexpectedly found the inscribed Decree of Heavenly Father and Decree of Heavenly Brother of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom at the British Library in 1984. These were extremely important to researchers who studied the early history of Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Before the discovery of these two scarce items, hardly anybody had knowledge of their existences. To mention these seemingly unrelated topics, I have this wishful thinking that some important documents, concerning the Chinese postage stamps, might still be lying quietly inside the cabinets of some organizations in London and are waiting for us to wake them up to rewrite the history.

The year of 2018 marks the 140th anniversary for the birth of the Large Dragons. The De La Rue Archives for China, 1877, translated and written by Zhao Yue, may be regarded as the best birthday present ever. I hope more conscientious people might pay attentions to this field by collecting more information, especially documentary files and historical literatures, and accumulating more in-depth knowledge to construct some specific and precise frameworks for the narrative of postal history. After all, these are our own Chinese stamps, and their history should eventually be written on our own.

Pan Zhenping

June 2018