In recent months a seller on Kobay has been selling individual pages with sample revenue stamps on them. The pages seem to be a 1960s/1970s set of samples which were sent to relevant authorities to be able to check which stamps were needed for which product. But who knows more about these stamps? Or has details with regards to which stamp was produced when?
Notice that the stamps have both English and Korean text on them: “Liquor Tax Revenue Stamp” and “Republic of Korea” in English, and “주세납세필증지” and “대한민국정부 겅정” in Korean. Some information about which stamp was used for which (type of) product can be deduced from the text in the center of some of these stamps. For instance “과실 360ml”, which is probably some alcoholic beverage made of fruit (= 과실) or containing fruit, in a bottle/container of 360ml. But what beverage could that actually have been?
Other terms are less clear to start with. What do “증소” and “회소” for instance mean in relation to these stamps? Their literal translations don’t mean much, but they could be abbreviations of course. A previous round of these pages created quite a bidding war on Kobay. Usually Korean tax revenue stamps are sold for rather low prices, but some of these pages went for as much as 150 dollars!
The Korean tax office has published a bit about these pages in their own books. Here are two examples of how these pages were part of booklets:
All the pages have the Sino-Korean (“hanja”) characters for year, month and day on them, but unfortunately none of these have any numbers next to them. This means there is no clue as to when these pages were issued/published. But these paper stamps are even today still in use in Korea. Here is an example from the last few years:
The (rather grainy) photos of the plastic cap show another modern version (2016) of these stamps, where the image of the tax stamp is printed directly onto the plastic. However, it is still very much recognizable as the paper tax stamps of the past:
Two examples of alcohol tax revenue stamps from my own collection:
The stamps below are slightly different tax stamps. They are not specifically for alcohol, they are general excise tax stamps. These could be found on all sorts of products including records (such as “LP’s”) and sets of playing cards.
On these pages a bit more information is given. Under A, B and C the product(s) for which these stamps were used have been specified.
All Kobay images are from Kobay seller “kijun2000”.
If you have more information on these pages or for instance stamps such as these, please leave your remark below in the comments section.
