国产热热热精品,亚洲视频久久】日韩,三级婷婷在线久久,99人妻精品视频,精品九热人人肉肉在线,AV东京热一区二区,91po在线视频观看,久久激情宗合,青青草黄色手机视频

USEUROPEAFRICAASIA 中文雙語(yǔ)Fran?ais
Lifestyle
Home / Lifestyle / Most Viewed

Animal magic

By Yang Ning | China Daily | Updated: 2011-02-12 10:42

Animal magic 

China's zodiac cycle is celebrated by the post office with an annual series of new editions of stamps, and some can bring untold fortune. Yang Ning reports.

Rabbits now can be seen on almost everything in China. That's because 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit, according to the country's traditional zodiac cycle of 12 animals. You can see rabbits on clothing, earrings, bags, toys and a plethora of other items. There is even rabbit-shaped food on sale. However, the hottest items of all are rabbit stamps. In early January, hundreds of thousands of people waited at midnight outside post offices across the land for the first-day release of rabbit stamps by China Post. Some post offices sold out within a few hours. Their popularity means that the price of rabbit stamps is now rising on a daily basis in the secondary markets. "On a sheet of 20 rabbit stamps with a face value of 1.2 yuan (18 cents) each stamp is now selling for about 80 yuan, more than three times its face value,?said Liu Lixia, a stamp trader at Beijing Madian Stamp Market, one of the biggest stamp trading markets in the country.

On Jan 24, Zhang Renping, a 65-year-old stamp collector from Beijing told China Daily that he had paid 67 yuan for a sheet of 20 rabbit stamps a week before.

"I came back to the market to buy more stamps as Spring Festival gifts for my friends, but to my surprise, the price had soared within just one week," he said.

"The stamp industry is very prosperous this year. The value of all stamps has appreciated," said Wu Caihong, general manager of Shanghai Post Company, in an interview with Channel News Asia.

The prices of many other old-edition zodiac stamps have gained as much as 20 percent. Those price rises have helped to end a 13-year depression in the stamp market, and so collectors are increasingly eager to purchase zodiac stamps this year, he said.

Yang Mo, a postgraduate student at Peking University, said: "I was born in 1987, which was also the Year of the Rabbit. At that time, my parents brought one rabbit stamp with a face value of 0.08 yuan. They never thought the price would jump to 700 yuan today."

China Post has been issuing Chinese zodiac stamps, based on the images of the 12 animals, annually since 1980. "Golden Monkey" stamps were the first to be issued.

On Jan 5 this year, a complete sheet of 80 golden monkey stamps from 1980, with paper margins and no folding marks, sold for 1.2 million yuan at the 2011 Suzhou Auction for Rare Stamps in Jiangsu province.

The same auction also saw a single golden monkey stamp from the first issue set a record, selling for 10,000 yuan. That's 125,000 times its original price of 0.08 yuan.

According to traders at Madian Stamp Market, each of the original golden monkey stamps is currently worth more than 12,000 yuan.

"Five million golden monkey stamps were released in 1980, but the vast majority were used for mailing letters, leaving only a few on the market, and thus pushing up the price," said Wang Hua, a market trader.

Sometimes those early stamps can bring unforeseen wealth to lucky individuals. In 1980, a former stamp seller who worked for the post office in Wuhan, Hubei province, was forced to buy his entire unsold stock of golden monkey stamps to clear the inventory. He is now a millionaire because of that enforced purchase.

He paid 96 yuan - the equivalent of three months' salary at the time - for 15 sheets of the golden monkey series, each of which had 80 stamps.

In the early 1990s, he sold two sheets at a price of about 300,000 yuan each to buy apartments for his two sons when they got married. He has sold three more sheets since then.

However, he still owns 10 sheets, valued at approximately 12 million yuan today.

(China Daily 02/11/2011 page8)

Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349
FOLLOW US
金川县| 九台市| 阳江市| 临洮县| 台中县| 南皮县| 淮滨县| 阳山县| 三亚市| 那曲县| 双柏县| 兴海县| 二手房| 贡山| 天台县| 缙云县| 平原县| 商水县| 扶沟县| 上饶县| 怀宁县| 扶余县| 新平| 白沙| 萨迦县| 邹平县| 津南区| 洪江市| 西乌珠穆沁旗| 大新县| 兴化市| 南投县| 望城县| 铁岭市| 罗平县| 金坛市| 洱源县| 桦南县| 洪雅县| 临江市| 渑池县|