1. Were individual English letters and individual Chinese characters inserted into most handstamps?
2. Are there pictures of hand held cancellation stamps (handstamps) from 1912 through 1949?
3. Were handstamps owned by each postal worker, or were they property of the post office?作者: quaff 时间: 2015-1-16 08:18
My English is poor.
The picture looks indistinct.
The letter "S" in the word " CHANGSHA " ,form the picture, isn' t like exact "S ".
And I don't think the word is " CHANGSHA ".作者: 陆小凤 时间: 2015-1-16 10:50
Yes,it doesn't look like "changsha".作者: Vilyehn 时间: 2015-1-17 05:40
Thanks for the replies.
Using the internet list of post offices and the printed 1936 list, I could not find another match to the cancel other than CHANGSHA.
Without another example, nothing can be proven.
I have 40 CHANGSHA cancels from 1912-1949. Only two have the same block style font on a Junk.
The S looks flat on the bottom as with the CHANGSMA example.
Unproven. Unprovable.
Dear William,
This is a CHANGSHA cancellation.
There is no need to debate and argue.. The character is not 'M' but 'H'. It's just the ink too much..
Date slug is adjustable and exchangeable.. But the Chinese character and English character are fixed.
Hope this clear your doubt.作者: Vilyehn 时间: 2015-1-17 15:14
Re: the Chinese character and English character are fixed.
I have been trying to get a confirmation on the use of fixed slugs as opposed to individual letters.
There are so many cancels where the name of the city is made from two or three different font styles and in two or three different letter heights.
And if the city name is composed of a single slug, how is the WUHU back slant formed? There are many bilingual cancels that show the English letters with a slight top shift to the left. Some WUHU cancels have the greatest shift seen so far. Are the letters leaning when the slug is made?
I am be weak in cancellation. So my objections are inaccurate.
But I am not sure all Chinese character are fixed in cancellation.
The SHEKLUNG is “石龙” in Chinese.
And the "2" must be a letter more than be a number on the possibility. Look at it, that don't like 2.
I infered it is an upside “S”.作者: Vilyehn 时间: 2015-1-19 22:09
Thank you Quaff. I am very weak in Chinese, and no question is objectionable when an answer is unknown and perhaps even possibly unknowable. There might not be an exact history of how handstamps were made and used.
An inverted S is still S. Top and bottom half are identical.
An inverted P is a d. The letter has been rotated 180 degrees
A flipped S looks like a Z or 2. The S letter cannot be rotated to do this. A different letter or number had to have been used. The S middle stroke goes from left to right. The Z or 2 middle stroke goes from right to left.
Whatever it is that was used on the pictured SHEKLUNG CANCEL, the stroke over the stamp's 2 of 1/2 goes from right to left.
Unanswered mysteries are fun.
Another question:
4. Did Post Office workers have to have a knowledge of English?
I can refer to a quote from the
Report on the Working of the Chinese Post Office, for the Third Year of Chung-Hua Min-Kuo (1914) Page 6, Sinkiang....
...the Post Office consequently had great difficulty in finding men to serve in any rank.
The English alphabet is very dyslexic.
b d p q -- the exact same shape either rotated or flipped.