AFPHONG KONG — A stamp that was pulled from circulation the day it was issued because it failed to show Taiwan as part of China fetched a record price at auction in Hong Kong on Sunday.
The rare 1968 stamp was picked up by an unidentified Asian buyer, who paid 3.68 million Hong Kong dollars (475,000 US dollars), a record for a Chinese stamp.
Six other smaller stamps of the same design were also sold for a combined 2.93 million Hong Kong dollars.
Designer Wang Wei Sheng, who watched the hammer fall, told AFP he had feared he would be punished for his mistake.
"For a long time I was really worried that I would be jailed," he said.
"Officials told me that it was a really big mistake, but in the end nothing happened."
Wan and other designers had been commissioned to make a series of stamps during the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of mass political and social upheaval in China starting in the mid-sixties.
His stamp features a worker holding a book filled with leader Mao Zedong's quotations and a red China map in the background.
However, Wan had left Taiwan uncoloured, a blunder that sparked a recall of the stamps just half a day after their release.
Taiwan split from China in 1949 at the end of a civil war and has been ruled separately since, but Beijing still considers the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification.
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