Hong Kong: QV fugitive inks.

Well, Anping, it's as if you knew what my next question about the HK QV stamps was going to be!  I was just about to scan and post a photo of my copy of HK, Scott #47, but I won't bother now, as it is clear to me that mine is the same as your top image.  It has been soaked and lightened.

Oh, well, at least now I know what to look for in terms of finding a stamp which is one of the correct colours.  Thanks for posting this!

Following on from the above, here is the same parent stamp but overprinted 10 cent; 1898 SG55/a (Scott #69 [no variant listed]). This has the additional Chinese chop. Once again the top stamp has faded somewhat. The next row shows the Grey-green and the yellow-green:




Additional care should be taken when selecting these, as they are rather pricey. Aside from good copies being rather difficult to find, many of these are plagued with grotty cancels.

Now that is a keeper. As you point out, the stamp itself is somewhat faded from immersion BUT the interesting part is the blue handstamp. I don't recognise this. It may be a firm's chop (but too unclear at the moment), or it's an instructional marking. Probably the former because of the ink colour but a high res scan could be tinkered with to reveal more clues. 

There is a study area within the Hong Kong Study Circle dedicated to firm's chops and forwarding agent's cachets. There is an online library of these, but it is a little difficult to navigate if you don't have a reasonable starting point.

When I get time, I'll check to see if any instructional markings are recorded that resemble yours.

It was well worth posting BG.

All right, Anping , I hope that you can see the high resolution image. Please let me know if you cannot.  If you can, then this will be my 2nd successful post using Google Photos instead of Photobucket. Thanks again to Steve (tomiseksj ), whose tutorial finally helped me to make it work.  I'm still not 100% sure why it wasn't working before, but there you are!

Anyway, if you can shed any more light on the markings on this stamp, I would enjoy knowing. The blue or purple chop seems to read something like:

CV (later shown to be Chinese characters)
WENOT (later identified by Anping as WENDT)
HONGK

The first line is the hardest one to make out. When I blow up the 1200dpi image, that first line looks like it could be Chinese characters rather than "CV" as it appears to me with the unaided eye. How does it look to you?

Distance from the top edge of the top frame line to the bottom edge of the bottom frame line:  13mm

Height of the lettering:  2mm on line #2 (WENDT), but a bit smaller on line #3, maybe 1.5mm (HONGK)

Not sure if I understand this last one, but here's what I have tried to measure:

From the right-hand upright of the "H" to the upright of the "K" is 7mm

Here is the image posted again, but this time from Postimage instead of Google Photos, which some members could not see:

Yes. These are referred to properly as security markings. These came more into use when perfins were prohibited by the postal authorities (can't remember when). Pilfering of stamps was a big problem in Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports, hence the vast array of these. Even from Royal Navy ships and other establishments.

I can't find much about the company, except it was German and may have had offices in Ice House Street Hong kong. There is a reference to a company of the same name having gone into liquidation in 1908.

Wow!  If you hadn't described what we were looking at precisely, and if the postmarks were not present, I would have thought that this was a photo of the back of the stamp rather than the front after soaking.  Even after all these years, the ink is apparently just as water soluble as it ever was.

I am still amazed and disappointed that the Scott catalogues do not mention this important point at all for this particular stamp (10-cent violet on red paper, HK Scott #44)--only the 30-cent gray green, HK Scott #47, is mentioned as having fugitive ink.

Thanks again, Anping, for posting about this.  I feel certain that I have already damaged some of my early HK stamps by unknowingly soaking them.  At least now I know better what not to do, and I know what to look for in future acquisitions.