标题：迟到的新年礼物 一个好信息
HONG KONG -- In 1873, a clerk at the Boston, Massachusetts, head office of the Tudor Ice Company pasted three postage stamps to the front of an ordinary-looking envelope that ultimately would travel halfway around the world, via London, Brindisi, Alexandria and Bombay, to the company's storage facility in Calcutta, India.
Within a few decades, the envelope and its three bicolor stamps had captured the imagination of serious collectors. The Ice House cover, as it came to be known in philatelic circles -- "cover" refers to a stamp attached to an envelope -- was the only known example of an envelope bearing a rare 90-cent, full-face portrait of Abraham Lincoln. While the 1869 Lincoln stamp on its own was never worth more than a few thousand dollars, the unique Ice House cover was highly prized as early as the turn of the 20th century.
Over time, as the envelope with its curling script passed through the hands of several U.S. collectors, its value and reputation grew, and its story became more intriguing. In 1967, burglars broke into the Indiana home of a steel magnate, J. David Baker, and stole his stamp collection, including the Ice House cover. The precious envelope -- Mr. Baker paid $6,500 for it in 1964 -- was missing for almost three decades until an elderly couple stumbled on it along with a bundle of stamps while cleaning out the house of a deceased friend in 2006. The couple was cleared of all wrongdoing and the Ice House cover was returned to the Baker family.
Last June, when the Ice House cover went up for sale, the bidding at Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries was feverish, and offers came in from every corner of the world. In the end, the winning bid, a staggering $431,250, plus a 15% buyer's premium that brought the cost to almost half a million dollars, went to a Hong Kong physician and stamp collector, Arthur K.M. Woo.
Dr. Woo's bid was no record breaker. Siegel, a 130-year-old stamp auction house in New York, cites recent examples of several stamps that have sold for more than $1 million. But the sale points to a geographic shift in philately, which until now had centered mostly on collectors in the West: Asians from China to India to Japan are emerging as serious buyers willing to fork over large sums for sought-after stamps, thanks in part to rising fortunes in the region, as well as the ease with which fledgling collectors can now get access to stamp dealers, auction houses and philatelic societies thanks to the Internet. This burgeoning group also is helping to lift the nascent market for stamps from Asia, at a time when the value of stamps from other regions is drooping.
"In the U.S. and U.K., stamps, like other collectibles, have fallen in value during the past two years because of the financial crisis. This has not been the case in China, or other Asian markets, based upon bidding at our auctions," says Louis Mangin, director of Hong Kong-based stamp broker Zurich Asia. Just last week at a Zurich Asia auction in Hong Kong, a rare Chinese stamp from 1897 sold for HK$2,587,500 (about $334,000), including a 15% buyer's premium. The sale, to an anonymous buyer from China, set a world auction record price for a single Chinese stamp.
Despite the weaker global economy, a time when many have been forced to watch their spending, stamp collectors haven't lost their enthusiasm for "passion investing."
Frowned upon in China as a bourgeois pastime during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), stamp collecting there has become popular in recent years. China's National Post and Postage Stamp Museum opened in Beijing in 1985 and collecting was actively encouraged by the government, possibly to promote a patriotic interest in the nation's history. By some estimates, there are now 15 million active stamp collectors in China, out of 50 million world-wide.
Chinese collectors, especially those who lived through the Cultural Revolution, favor the colorful stamps, many featuring portraits of Chairman Mao Zedong, issued during that politically chaotic period. They were printed in great numbers and most remain relatively inexpensive, though some of the rarer issues go for hundreds and thousands of dollars. A few, which were withdrawn from circulation before being widely distributed, now sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Other sought-after stamps are those issued in areas of China that were under Communist control before the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949.
In April, the central Chinese city of Luoyang hosted the World Stamp Exhibition, the Olympics of philately, a decade after Beijing hosted the event for the first time in China in 1999. Visitor numbers for April's seven-day fair were said to have been in the hundreds of thousands. And the line to see the Royal Philatelic Collection -- one of the world's finest, started by King George V and carried on by succeeding British monarchs -- encircled the exhibition hall day after day.
"The people (in Luoyang) went crazy," says Andrew Cheng, chairman of the Hong Kong Philatelic Society. "They were not all rich people, but they were just buying everything. The masses, you just would not believe it. And compared to 1999, you've got a lot more serious collections by mainlanders."
China isn't the only hotbed of philatelic activity in Asia. Spink, a London-based auctioneer, held its first annual stamp auctions in Singapore and Hong Kong in 1997. "Each year we see new collectors emerging in Singapore and Malaysia leading to higher prices," says Tim Hirsch, Spink's managing director of global auctions. In Singapore in July, an auction of "Stamps of South East Asia" generated sales of about $1 million, "a fantastic sum," says Mr. Hirsch. The sale featured, among other rarities, a sheet of "Four Cents" stamps from the Straits Settlements -- the former British colony in Southeast Asia -- from March 1899, which sold for about $41,600.
Philately has its origins in the 1860s (the word was coined in 1864), when the first stamp catalogs -- complete listings of published stamps -- were issued in France and England. Back then, there were about 2,400 varieties; today there are more than 200,000, far too many for a single collector to amass. Most collectors tend to specialize in stamps of a single country, continent, subject or period of time. The rarer the stamp, the more valuable it is: Those issued between 1840 -- when the first postage stamp was printed in England -- and 1875 are the most rare and thus, the most valuable. Stamps with errors, such as the 1918 U.S. 24-cent airmail stamp with an airplane pictured upside down, are also valuable. And entire collections, when sold as one set, can fetch millions.
It can take years to build a valuable portfolio of stamps. But budding collectors who want instant gratification can now buy prepackaged portfolios from dealers such as venerable London broker Stanley Gibbons. The minimum investment in these portfolios is £10,000 (about $16,600), though the average investment is about $50,000. Each portfolio includes some "blue chip" stamps -- well regarded, expensive and expected to generate stable returns -- as well as other stamps from emerging markets that aren't worth much now but might be later.
Geoff Anandappa, a portfolio manager with Stanley Gibbons, says the firm has pulled in about $62 million in collectibles portfolios, which include autographs and other collectibles. Now he's hoping that Asian stamp enthusiasts will push that figure even higher. In the past 12 months, he has signed up Asian investment advisers to market the portfolios, including Wealth Management Group in Hong Kong and Pemberton Investments in Singapore.
"In Asia, you find that a lot of doctors, lawyers, architects and so on are collectors. It's seen as a hobby that a lot of professional people do, not as something for children, which is the way it has been in the West," says Mr. Anandappa. "When you talk to people (here), they know that stamps can be very valuable."
Write to Duncan Mavin at duncan.mavin@wsj.com
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