There is a risk doing an endangered species stamp issue. Even near valueless stamps like this one last and so later generations can measure how important maintaining species, even cute ones, was to Vietnam. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Vietnam is not going to come across very well in this article. That does not mean this is an unattractive stamp. Even here though there is Vietnamese shirking. During the 1980s, Vietnam outsourced their stamp printing to Cuba, so it is perhaps them to whom we should thank. In an earlier period of chaos, stamp printing quality declined to the point they couldn’t perforate the stamps. Since those became more valuable, Vietnam dutifully offered the collector imperforate versions of later stamps, even for this issue having Cuba print some imperforates.
Todays stamp is issue A392, a one Dong stamp issued by Vietnam on February 26th,1984. It was a seven stamp issue in various denominations. The Scott catalog only values this issue as a set, but if you divide by seven you get a value of 14 cents cancelled to order. The current value of 1 Dong is 4.3 one/thousands of an American penny. This stamp imperferate rises in value to $1.70. That is over 39,000 Dongs.
The animal on this stamp is the Yunnan lar gibbon. Lar gibbons are all endangered but still exist in zoos and in small numbers in the wild in the Malay peninsula and northern Borneo. Vietnam no longer is home to any as theirs were the Chinese Yunnan variety. It was thought that a game preserve in Yunnan Province, China held the last of these. However there was a survey done of the park in 2007 and none were found and the sub species was declared extinct. The gibbons were not hunted much for food but their habitats were wrecked by logging and it was common to kill a gibbon mother so that the litter could be sold as pets.
What to do when a country is so worthless as to let this stuff happen? Well in Vietnam’s case, they now accept much foreign aid from their old rival the USA. Among the myriad of aid programs is the USAID Saving Species Project. They encourage enforcement of wildlife protections and put out public relations materials trying to discourage local human consumption of illegal wildlife. American aid to Vietnam was over 200 million dollars in 2020. I would wear out the zero button on my computer if I converted that to Dongs. The aid program currently targets endangered pangolins, elephants, and rhinos. May I suggest a new Cuban/Vietnamese stamp issue, imperforate for old times sake, of these animals, so future generations can determine if the American aid was well spent?
Well my drink is empty. Come again tomorrow for a hopefully more upbeat story that can be learned from stamp collecting.