Burt Wolf: Travels and Traditions

Stamp Collecting, China (6x9)

: 27, 2006

Collecting things might be part of an innate human desire to own stuff---to gather physical evidence of our lives and the natural world around us, and for thousands of years, people have collected and brought back stuff from their travels. But in 1837, something was created that was easy to collect and gave the collector the sensation of having traveled. It was the first postage stamp. Today, there are over 200 million stamp collectors. Burt Wolf looks at the history of stamp collecting, the most popular stamp ever printed, the most valuable stamp (over one million dollars), and the great forgeries. Then Burt travels to China to find out why the government has an official policy encouraging stamp collecting.