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| 1980: Kites |
The swallows have left us for the year and I will miss their swooping and darting flight but perhaps these Chinese Swallow Kites will stand in for them until they return next year. The one on the left is a Swallow Chick and on the right is Slender Swallow
Left, Semi-Slender Swallow and on the right a Duel Swallows.
Traditionally made from bamboo canes covered with paper and silk kite designs and construction can vary from region to region. The swallow is a symbol of love but the designs incorporated into the kite also have auspicious meanings with wings of flowers and fish symbolising a lucky and bountiful life.
The stamps are designed by Pan Keming (b1940) whose art has appeared on other China Post stamps on a variety of subjects.
One thing a kite can't do without is a good wind just like a windjammer sailing ship.
Built in Ramsey on the Isle of Man as the Euterpe (the muse of music and poetry) she started her career on the jute run from Liverpool to Calcutta which only lasted a short time but was certainly not uneventful, a mutiny, collision and a cyclone were all part of her two voyages. Shaw Saville bought Euterpe in 1871 sailing from Liverpool to New Zealand carrying emigrants to the southern hemisphere. The ship changed hands again in 1901 when the Alaska Packers Association bought her to take fishermen and supplies up to Alaska and with her holds full of canned salmon returning back to San Francisco. The ship was re-rigged and then renamed Star of India in 1906 although the original figurehead portraying Euterpe still remains on the ship today. The Star of India was laid up in 1923 and sold three years later to the Zoological Society of San Diego to be used as a museum but the great depression and a war intervened with fund raising and it was not until 1957 that work began to restore the Star of India to her former glory and in 1976 she once more sailed on the sea and today lays claim to being the oldest active sailing ship in the world. Now part of the San Diego Maritime Museum in California she sails every November.
The stamp paintings are by the Manx artist John Hobson Nicholson (1911-1988) who designed stamps, coins and banknotes for the island. This miniature sheet must be the last one he ever produced.
An entry to Viridian Postcard's Sunday Stamps "Anything You Wish" of which
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