30-Second Overview: In 1888, Liu Ming-chuan established the official postal headquarters in Taipei; before the modern postal system was fully formed in 1896, Taiwan already had its own postal routes and attempts at postal services. On the surface, stamps are merely proof that postage has been paid, but in reality, they place dragons, Sun Yat-sen, Kinmen gun turrets, Taiwanese fruits, birds, and indigenous artifacts into the same miniature image archive. Understanding these images reveals that stamps are not bystanders to history, but paper-based sites where each regime arranged how Taiwan should be viewed.
In 1888, Liu Ming-chuan established the Taiwan Postal Headquarters in Taipei, beginning to plan postal routes, handle mail, and issue stamps. This date was eight years earlier than the formal establishment of the Qing Dynasty’s General Postal Bureau; Taiwan’s modern postal system was not a complete institution transplanted from the outside, but rather a functional version that grew on the island first. 1 The Customs First Issue Cloud Dragon stamps issued in 1878 when the Qing Customs trialed postal services are listed by Taiwan Post as the country’s first stamp series; by 1896, when modern postal services officially began, these two time points together form the starting line of Taiwan’s postal history. 2
There is a contradiction easily overlooked here: stamps were initially just proof that postage had been paid, but they quickly became the state’s cheapest and most stable image publication. Envelopes are thrown away, but stamps are cut out, collected, and placed in stamp albums. Their size is small enough to require no explanation, yet their images often answer for an era “who is worthy of commemoration” and “which land is worthy of being seen.” Stamps are not complete history, but they leave behind the history that power once wanted people to see.
Liu Ming-chuan First Drew Postal Routes on the Island
The story of stamps cannot begin with a collector’s magnifying glass; it must begin with a real letter that traveled a postal route. The 1888 Taiwan Post Office cover sent from Taipei and then returned to Hushwei (Tamsui) bears stamps, postmarks, and traces of the postal route on it. This official envelope, sent by Liu Ming-chuan to Lieutenant General Li Wan-yu, served a military communication purpose; according to reports, only seven such post office covers from the same year survive. 3
This detail is important because it还原s “institutional establishment” into an action: someone writes a letter, someone affixes a stamp, someone sends it on its way. Postal service is not an abstract modern term, but a traceable route between Taipei, Tamsui, and military administration. That small stamp allowed Taiwan’s administrative power to appear in daily life for the first time in a way that could be touched, stamped, and forwarded.
📝 Curator’s Note: A nation is often written as borders and laws, but postal service first turns it into a road; people do not believe in a map first and then start sending letters, but rather, through repeated sending, slowly learn which places are connected to each other.
A Single Dragon Speaks for the Emperor First
The 1878 Customs First Issue Cloud Dragon stamp features a coiled dragon in the clouds as its core image; the dragon is a symbol of the emperor. Like the UK’s 1840 Penny Black, which bears the profile of Queen Victoria, both place supreme power into the proof of “postage paid.” The difference lies only in that one stamp draws power as the monarch’s face, while the other draws it as the emperor’s dragon. 2 Thus, stamps perform two functions simultaneously: they allow letters to travel, and they make the state appear every time a stamp is affixed.
After Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895, postal services were incorporated into the Japanese colonial system; between August and October of that year, the short-lived Republic of Formosa issued eight locally printed stamps. This brief chapter of postal history reminds us that stamps are not tools used only by victors; a regime that lasted only a short time also tried to use stamps to prove it was governing a place. 4
Postal services during the Taiwan Governor-General’s era followed a different administrative logic. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, due to monetary and administrative needs, Taiwan began designing and printing special stamps applicable to Taiwan. When new stamps were not yet available, old Japanese stamps were even overprinted with “For Use in Taiwan Province” to meet emergency needs. 5 These overprints were not mere printing flaws, but temporary grammar during regime transition: the same sheet of paper was re-marked, allowing post offices to continue working.
Stamps Paste War onto Daily Life
In 1949, stamp denominations were repeatedly rewritten. A postal history article in Taiwan Panorama records that the monetary situation was chaotic and inflation severe; the Sun Yat-sen Gold Yuan stamps’ face values were changed from ten dollars up to one million dollars, and later, post offices even filled in amounts at the time of mailing. 5 Stamps thus became a miniature dashboard of economic disorder: the paper did not get larger, but the numbers were forced to constantly chase the collapse of currency.
In the 1950s, stamps placed national construction and anti-communist mobilization side by side. Topics compiled by Taiwan Panorama include land reform, agriculture, the Cross-Island Highway, bridges, ports, and industrial construction, as well as the Jincheng Ou Kuang Tower in Kinmen and the series defending Kinmen and Matsu. Stamps placed “Taiwan under construction” and “Taiwan under defense” into the same national narrative. 5
This does not mean every stamp represents everyone’s life. It is more like a stage cast by officials: farmers, bridges, baseball boys, and Kinmen gun turrets can take the stage, while certain failures, conflicts, and the voices of the governed may remain off-stage. The 2022 Taipei Postal Museum exhibition on female images juxtaposed post-war stamps with original works and discussions from women’s groups, also pointing out that urban professional women and female factory workers in the industrial era were hard to find on stamp faces. 6
The exhibition also displayed Lin Chih-hsin’s 1994 woodcut paintings depicting Taiwanese rural life, Chen Chin’s 2003 works, and stamps side by side. When the original works are enlarged and stamps maintain their approximate three-by-four centimeter size, readers see a key difference: stamps do not just shrink the world; they also fix the power of which details the state can mass-reproduce. 6
From Kinmen’s Ou Kuang Tower to Taiwanese Fruits
In the 1960s, the gaze of stamps began to turn more clearly toward Taiwan itself. Taiwan Panorama records that topics such as Taiwanese fruits, birds, landscapes, fish, and flowers appeared successively. These images no longer only explained where a regime came from, but began to tell people what on this island was worth recognizing. 5
This turn does not mean politics disappeared. Researchers analyzing stamps themed around Taiwanese flora and fauna from 1958 to 2009 point out that, on one hand, they show higher artistic quality and originality compared to dogmatic political propaganda; on the other hand, they may still express national identity through endemic species and residential landscapes. In other words, when a stamp paints a bird or a flower, it is not just leaving politics, but replacing politics with a landscape that is easier to like. 7
📝 Curator’s Note: “Indigenous/local” does not necessarily begin with slogans; it may also begin with a stamp painting a Taiwan Blue Magpie, a pineapple, or a mountain view; but being painted into national images and being truly preserved by whom, or having whom speak, are never the same thing.
Indigenous Culture Enters the Square Inch
The “Taiwan Indigenous Culture Stamps (Continued)” issued in 2008 selected four artifacts: the Paiwan pottery jar, the Amis lover’s bag, the Rukai men’s headdress, and the Bunun men’s neck ornament. Taiwan Post’s issuance description not only lists the artifact names but also explains their significance in hierarchy, gift-giving, rituals, merit, and identity recognition. For example, the Amis lover’s bag extended from a daily carrying bag to an accessory for participating in the Harvest Festival and important events, becoming a symbol of collective identity. 8
This stamp series is worth looking at not because it “represents” the sixteen ethnic groups, but because it exposes the difficulty of representation: four stamps can make artifacts more visible, but they cannot compress a group’s language, land relations, and historical experience into four images. Stamps can open an entrance, but cannot replace the族人 (indigenous people) in finishing the story.
1996: Postal Services Begin to Defend Themselves
In 1996, Taiwan Post created a centennial commemorative stamp series featuring the evolution of four postal tools: mailboxes, weighing scales, postal carriers, and calculators. The issuance description simultaneously acknowledged that telecommunications technology, private delivery, and financial competition had already placed traditional postal services under pressure, thus postal services must promote automation and computerization to rebuild their service image. 9
The interesting aspect of this commemorative stamp series is that it did not just write the century of postal service as a glorious review. While commemorating mailboxes and postal carriers, it simultaneously acknowledged that traditional advantages were fading. Postal services had to explain why they still needed to exist while commemorating themselves. This contradiction remains valid today: electronic messages make letter-writing unnecessary, but they have not caused post offices to lose all work, because post offices still handle packages, finance, remote area services, and part of local public life.
The architectural history of the Taipei Post Office materializes this “continued existence.” The three-story steel structure completed in 1930 was once Taiwan’s largest post office. In the 1960s, floors were added and the front five-arch entrance was demolished due to space needs for postal vehicles; designated as a monument in 1992, it underwent renovation starting in 2010, and in 2019, the five arches were restored. It is not just a business venue, but a material witness to postal service’s journey from colonial administration, to post-war institution, to cultural asset. 1
Post Office Architecture Leaves Institutional Paper on Street Corners
If one only looks at stamp images, postal service can easily be thought of as a set of distant national symbols; walking to Taipei’s North Gate, one sees it actually has weight. Data from the Ministry of Culture indicates that when the Taipei Post Office was completed in 1930, it covered over 13,000 square meters; the exterior walls used light brown anti-aircraft color tiles made by the Beitou kiln, and the main entrance featured five semi-circular arch columns. 1
This building was expanded in the 1960s due to postal vehicle access and space needs, and the arches were demolished; in the 1970s, it once faced demolition. After being designated as a monument in 1992, preservation gained an institutional position; in 2019, the five arches were restored, and the building returned to the city’s sightline. 1 Thus, postal service not only connects localities, but also leaves objects in localities that need to be preserved, debated, and reused.
The controversy over post office preservation is exactly opposite to the function of stamps. Stamps compress a complex era into a few square centimeters; monuments expand that era into a building that cannot be easily moved. The former leaves memory through circulation; the latter leaves memory through staying. The Taipei Post Office possesses both time scales: letters must hurry, but buildings must remain.
A Stamp Has Not Finished Taiwan’s Story
Stamps are most easily misread as “a small piece of Taiwan history.” In fact, they are more like an edited catalog: the 1878 dragon, the 1888 post office cover, the 1895 short-lived regime, the 1949 out-of-control denominations, the 1950s construction and war, the 1960s fruits and birds, and the 2008 re-named and displayed indigenous artifacts all explain what different eras wanted to paste on envelopes and who they wanted to deliver to. 2 3 4 5 8
Therefore, what is truly worth collecting is not the overly complete statement “stamps represent Taiwan,” but the choices and absences left by each stamp. When we see a Taiwan Blue Magpie, we must ask who named it; when we see Kinmen’s Ou Kuang Tower, we must ask how war was shrunk into a landscape; when we see the indigenous lover’s bag, we must ask whether the voices of the indigenous people remain after the artifact enters national images.
This also explains why stamp collecting can be both a hobby and research. The National Stamp Exhibition report on Kinmen treats stamp items as a combination of stamps, postmarks, and postal routes, not just pretty patterns; the same post office cover allows one to trace the sender, recipient, transit points, and communication purpose. 3 When collecting moves from “I like this one” to “where did this one travel,” stamps become a method of reading historical materials.
The method itself carries limitations. Official issuance descriptions are good at telling us about stamp themes, designers, issuance dates, and artifact meanings, but they do not automatically tell us who was not selected; museum international explanations can place Taiwan into East Asian postal history, but may also沿用 (continue to use) larger national frameworks. 4 Thus, reading stamps cannot just ask “what did it paint,” but must place the issuing institution, historical context, and omitted subjects into the picture together.
Stamps are not only in the past tense. The 1996 centennial commemorative stamps already acknowledged the pressure from telecommunications and private delivery, and wrote automation and computerization into postal service’s self-renewal; 9 this means postal history is not a decline from a “golden age,” but a continuous change to prove that public service is still necessary.
Today, fewer people send letters, but this does not mean the social position of post offices in Taiwan has completely disappeared; rather, their value has shifted from mass private letters to packages, finance, remote area accessibility, and local architectural memory. The size of stamps has not changed, but the social relations postal services must handle are constantly changing.
For collectors, this change settles in versions, perforations, denominations, postmarks, and overprints. For ordinary senders, it may just be a piece of paper pasted on the upper right corner of an envelope. Both ways of seeing are true, because postal service serves both professional collecting and the most ordinary daily communication.
Therefore, stamps do not need to be mystified as artifacts only experts can understand. Knowing the 1878 Large Dragon stamps and the 1888 Taiwan Post Office covers is enough for people to begin asking how a letter passes through institutions; knowing the 1960s flora and fauna stamps and the 2008 indigenous culture stamps allows one to see how the state rewrites its own gaze.
Every stamp has an issuance date, but this does not mean its meaning only lives on that day. It may be cut out and preserved years later, taken to exhibitions, placed in the window of a monument post office, or travel with a family letter to another city. Circulation and preservation are not opposite fates, but the most special lifecycle of stamps.
Placing a stamp back into its issuance year, and then back into a letter’s route, adds two layers of understanding beyond looking at the image alone: who arranged the images, and who used this system.
The gap between these two layers is exactly where Taiwan stamps are most worth reading. They are small, yet they hold national imagination and the ordinary person’s act of sending letters.
Looking at stamp faces, postal routes, and absences together prevents mistaking images for all of history.
Stamps are never just postage proofs. They compress the state, localities, war, industry, nature, and family communication into a size that can be pasted, sent, and preserved. They did not leave complete answers for Taiwan, but left multiple-choice questions for every era: who was painted in, and who is still waiting for their own stamp.
References
- Ministry of Culture: Taipei Post Office — The 1888 postal origins, 1930 architecture, monument designation, and restoration history of the Taipei Post Office (original URL is 404, links to Wayback Machine archive).↩234
- Taiwan Post: The Birth of Stamps — Official historical explanation of the Penny Black, the 1878 Customs First Issue Cloud Dragon stamps, and the 1896 modern postal service.↩23
- Kinmen Daily News: National Stamp Exhibition Debuts in Kinmen on August 4 — Specific historical materials on the 1888 Taiwan Post Office cover, Liu Ming-chuan’s letters, stamps, postmarks, and postal routes.↩23
- Smithsonian National Postal Museum: Republic of China (Taiwan) — English museum collection explanation of Taiwan’s 1895 locally printed stamps and modern regime/postal history.↩23
- Taiwan Panorama: Stampede Through History — Tracing how stamps recorded war, construction, and local Taiwanese topics from 1878, 1888, 1895, 1945 to the 1970s.↩2345
- Taipei Times: Women’s stamp on Taiwan’s history — Reporting on the Postal Museum’s female image exhibition, Taiwanese female and indigenous theme stamps, and the gaps left by stamp choices.↩2
- Academia Sinica: Environmental Awareness and National Identity in Flora and Fauna Stamps — On the Image Documentary Value of Stamps — Analyzing the artistic quality, environmental awareness, and identity implications of Taiwanese flora and fauna stamps from 1958 to 2009.↩
- Taiwan Post: Special Issue 524 Taiwan Indigenous Culture Stamps (Continued) — Official explanation of the artifacts, issuance, and cultural significance of the 2008 four indigenous culture stamps.↩2
- Taiwan Post: Commemorative Issue 257 Postal Service Centennial Commemorative Stamps — Official explanation of the 1996 postal centennial commemorative stamps and postal service’s response to telecommunications, private delivery, and automation transformation.↩2