According to Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao, from design, printing to proofreading, a stamp with a theme produced in Hong Kong needs to be printed abroad and then shipped back to Hong Kong, and then the staff of the Hongkong Post Philatelic Bureau began to be busy, launching a series of philatelic products for the public to buy. The staff tore open a pile of stamps glued together with their bare hands, and used a machine to stamp 2,000 first day covers in 1 hour...
Infographic: The launch of a new set of stamps, accompanied by derivatives such as first day covers, leaflets and stamp albums. Photo credit: Hong Kong Ta Kung Pao / Lin Shaoquan photo
Hongkong Post launches about 10 to 12 sets of special stamps and commemorative stamps every year, and the birth of a new stamp takes 2 years.
Tang Bi'er, Senior Manager of Stamp Design and Procurement at Hongkong Post, said that anyone can comment on the design of stamps, such as the "Underwater World" theme stamps that are currently on sale, when they solicited opinions from the public two years ago, when some people proposed to join turtles, sharks, "Nemo" (the clownfish character in the movie), etc.
Every year, Hongkong Post submits the suggestions of the public to the Stamp Design Advisory Committee for consideration and consideration by the Secretary for Home Affairs of Hong Kong after selecting the theme.
As stamps are valuable bills that must be printed by confidential printers, Most of the stamps in Hong Kong are now printed by well-known confidential printing houses in France, the Netherlands, the Mainland and Australia. The stamps arrived in Hong Kong, and the stamps were manually torn into stamps, and Tang Bi'er said that the hand tearing of the stamps avoided damaging the shape of the stamp perforations.
Stamp perforations are one of the anti-counterfeiting features of stamps, and the shape is not the same, for example, the "Underwater World" theme stamps for the first time use fish-shaped perforation design, the "170th Anniversary of the HongKong Post Service" stamp issued in 2011 is a star-shaped perforation, and the 2000 Year of the Dragon Zodiac stamp does not have perforations.
The "ticket tearer" with decades of experience first tore off the 4 white edges, then folded them in half along each edge, and finally took 20 sheets as a bunch, tearing them along the perforations, and it only took 3 minutes to tear out 5,000 stamps.
As for the sticking of stamps to the first day cover and stamping, a machine is required. The stamp auto-pasting machine first crosses a set of 6 stamps with water to make them sticky, and then attaches them to 400 envelopes within 1 hour. Hundreds of envelopes are postmarked by an automatic stamper, allowing up to 2,000 envelopes to be stamped in an hour.