CHINA 2019 - World Stamp Exhibition in Wuhan. The CARTOR issues

CHINA 2019 - World Stamp Exhibition in Wuhan. Introduction

CHINA 2019 was held from June 11th to 17th at the International Expo Center in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, in the center of the country. The Wuhan metropolitan area has a population of about 20 million.
It was the third time that China hosted this world stamp exhibition. China joined the Fédération Internationale de Philatélie (F.I.P.) in 1983 and hosted the world stamp exhibition in 1999 and 2009. This great philatelic event celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and several governmental organizations were involved in its organization.

The CHINA 2019 logo depicts an origami pigeon with perforated edges in front of an image of the Yellow Crane Tower; Wuhan's iconic building. The shape of the origami figure mimics the letter 'W' of Wuhan and World.
The exhibition emblem is a cartoon character called 'Bin bin' shown carrying a stamp under his arm and with a hairstyle of the Metasequoia, a tree native to the province of Hubei.

The exhibition featured nearly 4,700 frames of collections submitted by collectors from over 80 countries, 3,500 of which participated in the different competition classes. Collectors and museums exhibited some of their most precious philatelic and postal treasures.

Participants included the main international philatelic dealers and auction houses, as well as security printing companies. In addition, there were about 100 postal administrations, some of whom were represented by international philatelic agencies.

China Post of course had a large stand together with numerous regional postal administrations from across the country.
China Post took advantage of the exhibition to showcase some of its most innovative projects, such as "postal robots" and the new parcel kiosk.

Exhibitions, cultural activities, talks, philatelic issues ... During the seven days, CHINA 2019 attracted more than 400,000 visitors!, thus demonstrating the strength and vitality that philately still has in this country and a visitor figure that confirms the wisdom, of international philatelic companies and postal administrations, in attending and releasing special stamp issues on the occasion of the main philatelic events in Asia.

Cartor Security Printing at CHINA 2019

Focusing in on our field of study, Cartor Security Printing attended the Wuhan world stamp exhibition with a promotional stand.
The Company displayed its interesting printing works and also had two DKU desktop kiosks installed; a kiosk renumbered with the code FO01 of Posta Stamps (on the left, in the image) and its CSP2 machine for demonstrations (on the right, in the background).

Indeed, Cartor rented out a DKU desktop kiosk and supporting logistics/infrastructure to Posta Stamps for the printing of its special series in Wuhan (see article, also published in VARIABLE 53). This approach significantly reduces installation and maintenance costs, and could possibly allow other postal administrations to have this type of equipment installed at future philatelic events for the printing of special issues.

		For its part, the CSP2 unit printed special souvenir labels/cinderellas with no postal value. For this exhibition Cartor produced rolls of sample self-adhesive thermal labels on film or transparent backing paper. The label design reproduces the exhibition emblem and logo, on a background showing a picture of the Yellow Crane Tower.

Visitors had the opportunity to buy labels with either the default commemorative imprint or, like on previous philatelic events, customized with text and the programmed 20 new clip art images and face emojis (strip below).

Cartor Security Printing has been producing this type of souvenir label for several international philatelic events since 2015. You can see all the designs in the different articles on our website and also in VARIABLE.