Taiwan’s Postal Museum expands COVID-19 exhibit

Philatelic Foreword by Jay Bigalke

In early March, Linn’s received a note about an exhibit at Taiwan’s Postal Museum that originally opened in October 2021 but has recently been expanded. This special exhibit is titled “Memorial Imprint 2.0: COVID-19 Prevention Stamp Exhibition.”

According to the museum’s flyer for the exhibit, the new version will run March 10 through Aug. 27.

I found some of the statistics the museum shared quite interesting.

The museum said: “By the end of 2022, 110 countries around the world have issued COVID-19 stamps. This exhibition displays 145 sets of COVID-19 stamps and some first day covers from 110 countries around the world.”

The challenge to seek out and obtain one of each of these issues was no small feat. And I know that, as I am probably one of a handful of collectors who has attempted to do the same for my collection through the stamps and postal history starting in late February 2020. There continue to be a few related stamp issues to add, but that is trickling off.

The museum said it partnered with Jui-Ping Ma, assistant professor at the Humanities and Arts Education Center under the General Education Center of Kaohsiung Medical University. A co-curator of the exhibit, Ma has been interested in stamp collecting since he was a child. He started collecting COVID-19 stamp issues in 2021 as mail-service suspensions around the world were beginning to lift.

Ma said that medical professional training is not the only educational function of the medical university: It also cultivates students’ empathy for different countries and nations that must support each other and care for each other.

“The term philately is one of the best channels to understand the history, humanity, local conditions and national policies of countries around the world,” Ma said in a press release. “Through the appreciation of stamps to understand the measures, appeals and even views, policies of various countries in epidemic prevention, is like a kind of enjoyment of both education and propaganda concept activities; it is hoped that this exhibition will expand the public’s global vision of life and increase the temperature of humanistic care.”

For more information on the postal museum, visit its website. As of this writing, Linn’s did not see an online version of the exhibition.

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