Scott No: 891-898
Serial number: S72
Values in set: 8
Date of issue: February 25, 1966
Denomination: 102 fen
Designer: Lu Tianjiao
Size of stamps: 56.5*23mm
Perforation: 11
Sheet composition: 50(5*10)
Printing process: Photogravure
Printing House: Beijing Postage Stamp Printing Works

S72 "Children's Sports" special stamps were issued on February 25, 1966. The set consists of 8 stamps, printed by photogravure, designed by Lu Tianjiao, and printed by the Beijing Stamp Factory. Stamp size 56.5 mm × 23 mm, perforation gauge 11, 50 stamps per sheet (5 × 10), with a total face value of 1.02 yuan for the set.

Theme of the Set

In the 1960s, the state advocated widely carrying out physical exercise among children and teenagers to strengthen their physiques, while also taking into account mass sports, national defense sports, and folk sports activities. This special set selects eight sports suitable for children and teenagers, including conventional sports such as track and field, ball games, gymnastics, and swimming, folk games such as skating and rubber-band skipping, and national defense sports content such as shooting and flag signaling, comprehensively displaying the vigorous and actively exercising spiritual outlook of New China's children. This set is also an important work from the late period of the old special stamps; shortly after its issuance, the issuance of special stamps came to a pause and gradually transitioned to the Wen-prefix stamp stage.

Stamp Designs and Historical Background

Playing Miniature Football

The design depicts a group of children playing miniature football on the grass, running, contesting, and passing in cooperation with agile movements. Miniature football has a small field and low intensity, very suitable for children to carry out collective sports and cultivate team cooperation awareness from childhood.

Racing

The design shows a children's sprint race, with several children running forward with all their strength and companions accompanying and cheering them on, restoring the relaxed and lively atmosphere of a school track-and-field competition and embodying the popularization of basic track and field among young people.

Ice Sports

The design shows northern children's activities on the ice: a child sits on a simple ice sled while a companion pushes hard from behind to slide, a very popular outdoor game in the northern winter at the time, full of winter childlike charm and displaying the appearance of carrying out sports activities according to local conditions.

Gymnastics

At the center of the design a girl is performing a gymnastic movement in the air, with other children practicing in formation behind her, embodying the popularization of school gymnastics and children's competitive gymnastics and encouraging children to exercise flexibility and bodily coordination.

Swimming

The design is a summer water scene: several children swim in the water, and a small sailboat is on the water. Swimming combines physical exercise with survival skills and was a key children's water sport promoted at the time.

Shooting, Flag Signaling

This stamp belongs to the national defense sports theme: a little girl holds a gun and aims for shooting practice, while children beside her hold signal flags and practice flag signaling communication. Under the historical background of the time, national defense sports were an important part of children's extracurricular exercise, intended to popularize basic national defense knowledge.

Rubber-Band Skipping

The picture is a classic folk children's game: several girls skip rubber bands to the rhythm, while other children hold the band and watch and join in. Rubber-band skipping is extremely widely spread and requires no complicated equipment; it is a recess activity deeply loved by girls.

Playing Table Tennis

The design freezes the moment a youngster swings the racket to hit the ball, with companions sitting around watching. Table tennis was a nationwide sport with an extremely high participation rate at the time, widely participated in by children and teenagers, and also an important event in Chinese-foreign sports exchange.

Artistic Design Features

The set uniformly adopts a narrow horizontal stamp format, with expansive compositions very suitable for expressing dynamic sports scenes. The overall style is bright and fresh, with concise lines and bright, soft colors; the figures are lively and round, without the strong tension of posters, focusing on expressing children's innocent and carefree state. The designer Lu Tianjiao was good at capturing children's dynamics; each stamp captures a moment of movement, and the figures' postures are full of dynamism. The eight events are balanced, taking into account north and south regions, indoor and outdoor, ordinary sports and national defense sports.

Among the whole set, the 10-fen rubber-band skipping and the 52-fen table tennis stamps each have a circulation of only 2 million copies, far fewer than the low-denomination stamps. In addition, the high denominations were mostly used for international mail, with concentrated consumption, making these two stamps the most difficult to collect in the set. Few complete and well-preserved examples of this set survive; forgeries are mostly offset-printed imitations. The genuine photogravure stamps have transparent colors and clean outlines, while the imitations have coarse dot patterns and dull colors.