Hello everyone. Last Tuesday, you may recall,  I asked for entries to a competition that required readers to write a piece on Hong Kong stamps. I had this brilliant piece from one of my regular readers in The Netherlands. Congratulations for the writing.  I hope everyone enjoys reading it and seeing the stamps I will be displaying over the coming days. The above stamps are the first issue  

The reader writes:

Before I read this blog I didn’t knew that there was a recent handover of Hong Kong. And also didn’t know much about Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China. As a recently started World Wide collector it’s time to learn more about it. So were to start, of course Wikipedia and Google.

Just a brief overview, there is a lot of info to be found on the internet.

The handover of Hong Kong took place on 1 July 1997, which marked the end of British rule in Hong Kong. Hong Kong became China’s first Special Administration Region. The handover ended officially the 156 years of British colonial rule. There is a second Special Administration Region; Macau, which transferred on 20 December 1999.

Back to the philatelistic facts.

Before the handover in 1997 , the poststamps of Hong Kong had the portrait of King/Queen of the United Kingdom. After the handover it uses the words “Hong Kong, China”, which is required by Basic Law.

Poststamps prior to the handover were demonetized, however, politically neutral stamps were not.

So were there any poststamps published by a country to mark the Hong Kong handover. I search the internet and a lot of catalogues, and game up with the following countries, which issued at least one or more stamp(s), souvenir sheet, first day cover, booklet, presentation pack  or any other kind of philatelistic stuff. This list isn’t properly by far complete, but I find it interesting that so many countries gave it “a little” attention. Of course this list contains a lot of British Overseas Territories. However, no Dutch stamps were published with this subject.

This is the 10th Anniversary issue.

Hereby the countries with a few poststamps as an example:

Ascension Island, Bahamas, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, Central African Republic, China (of course), Dominica, Falkland Islands, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Isle of Man, Great Britain, Grenada, Grenada Grenadines, Guyana, Korea (several stamps), Namibia, Norfolk Island, Palestinian Authority, St. Helena, Samoa, Sierra Leone, South Georgia, Tanzania, Togo, Tristan Da Cunha, Tuvalu

and this just one of the other issues from other countries, from Namibia.

Thanks to J .  Hope everyone enjoyed this.

Michael   www.cddstamps.com