It Happened Here: Hong Kong gets its first postage stamp, December 8, 1862
It was not until December 8, 1862, some 21 years after the foundation of the first post office, that the first definitive set of Hong Kong postage stamps were issued.
The design of the first set of stamps, featuring a portrait of Queen Victoria, was engraved by Jean Ferdinand Joubert, one of the most accomplished and influential of the postage stamp engravers of the mid-19th century. This set of seven stamps was actually ordered by the Governor of Hong Kong in March 1861, but it took over a year for the UK to approve the order.
The first stamps, priced from two cents to 96 cents, were printed by the line-engraved method on unwatermarked paper. But from 1863 onwards, all Hong Kong stamps appeared on paper watermarked with a Crown and the letters CC (Crown Colonies).
By the end of the Victorian era in 1901, 61 stamps had been released, and a new period of stamps bearing the visage of King Edward VII ensued. The Commonwealth’s current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, first got her mug on the stamps on January 5, 1954. The Queen’s face finally disappeared in a set of stamps issued on January 16, 1997, but it wasn’t until October 18, 1999, that our stamps finally acknowledged that our territory was now “Hong Kong, China”.
Jinxin Ma
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