A former postal worker in China who once earned barely 30 yuan (about Rs210) a month has become a millionaire several times over in one of the most unlikely rags-to-riches stories to come from a China on the rise.
A former postal worker in China who once earned barely 30 yuan (about Rs210) a month has become a millionaire several times over in one of the most unlikely rags-to-riches stories to come from a China on the rise.
Qin, a former postal worker in Wuhan in Hubei province in central China, was forced in 1980 — before China had opened up to the world — to buy unsold stamps from China’s first issuance of stamps commemorating the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac.
That year was the year of the ‘Golden Monkey’, and the stamps that were issued bore the pattern of the ‘red monkey’ designed by Chinese master painter, lithographer and sculptor Huang Yong Yu.
Since the stamps didn’t sell too well, Qin, along with other postal staff workers, was forced to pick up the unsold stamps to clear the inventory.
Qin was required to fork out 96 yuan (about Rs700), which was equivalent to three months’ salary at that time, for 15 sheets of the stamp series, each of which had 80 ‘Golden Monkey’ stamps of the face value of 8 fen (about 50 paise).
Qin put away the “extraordinarily expensive” stamps that had cost him three months’ salary, and forgot about them for years.
Since then, for every Chinese new year, China’s postal service has issued stamps bearing the image of the zodiac animal for that year; yet, among philatelists, the first ever series of zodiac animal stamps — of the ‘Golden Monkey’ — became something of a treasured and much-sought-after item.
And with a rapidly increasing ‘new moneyed’ class in China, particularly along the booming cities in eastern China, the rare stamps have shot up in value.
Earlier this month, a full sheet of 80 ‘Golden Monkey’ stamps with complete paper margins and no folding marks — of the sort that Qin bought 15 of in 1980 — was bid for 1.2 million yuan (nearly Rs8 lakh) at an auction in Suzhou in Jiangsu province in eastern China.
On that basis, Qin’s collection, for which he paid 96 yuan in 1980, would be worth 18 million yuan (or about Rs1.2 crore) today.
As it turns out, Qin sold five of his ‘Golden Monkey’ stamp sheets nearly 10 years ago to buy two apartments for his two sons for their marriage.
But that still leaves him with 10 sheets, valued today at 1.2 million yuan each — a fortune that’s more than adequate payback, he’d reckon, for the ‘monkey business’ by China’s postal department 30 years ago.
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