The Whole Country Is Red(Unissued)

　　　Through one year and eight months from the "January Storm"held

by the rebels in Shanghai in January,1967 up toNovember,1968,the po-

wer of the Party leadership was under the control of the local rebe-

ls successively in 29 provinces,municipals or autonomous regions in

China excluding Tai Wan. It was this time the "Revolutionary Commit-

tee" was established. On November 7,1968,the rerm "All the territor-

y of China is red" was firstly put forward in the articles in Peopl-

e's Daily and PLA News.In order to celebrate this "All-round Victory

of the cultural Revolution", the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunic-

ations decided to complete designing, plate making and printing wit-

hin the shortest time and issue this stamp. Since early November,the

famous designing expert Wan Weisheng started to design the pattern of

the stamp. The first draft was that Mao Tzedong and Lin Biao were sa-

luting with their hands to the revolutionary people who were warmly

cheering for the saying (slogan) "the whole country is red". The cap-

tion of the stamp was "Long live the all-round victory of the prolet-

arian cultural revolution". (the trial printing of the stamp was spr-

ead out to the society and was considered to be the one of the preci-

ous stamps of China). However, this first draft was not approved when

examined that the focus should be put on " red everywhere". Due to the

limited time, Wan Weisheng eliminated Mao Tzedong and Lin Biao from t-

he first draft and abbed the map of China as a red background. On the

stamp there were seven golden Chinese characters "Everywhere in china

is red". On this pattern, the map of Taiwan was white color with red

edge. The image of workers, peasants and soldiers were enlarged and p-

ut into a very noticeable position. Being approved this time, the Min-

istry of Posts and Telecommunications was originally going to issue t-

his stamp on November 25 and its number was 14. But at that time the

management in regulation system was not serious, a number of post of-

fices issued this stamp earlier in time. Unfortunately, Chen Chao from

the Map Publishing house of China, Beijing Branch found a problem in

this stamp___the caption was not appropriate enough. Because it could

not be "Everywhere in China is Red" since Taiwan is in white color. So

the Military Managing Committee decided to stop issuing this stamp and

collecting back all the stamps, destroying them. However, those few o-

nes which were already spread to the society could not be collected a-

nd became the precious stamps in China. It is estimated that there are

about 1000 stamps of this kind remaining now, and among them, many we-

re very worn out, Their market price is around RMB30.000. The price f-

or the few good ones is RMB150,000. see picture