Thursday 23 April 2015

New registration process

One more new process adapted is that all the registered mail going out from Myanmar has pasted the registration label with bar code and Registered Article Number (tracking number) ending with MM on the cover (Fig 1).  Please not that, the actual date of posting of that cover (Fig 1) is 7 Jan 2015, but Bagan PO postmark comes with wrong date, 7 Jan 2005.  The post office staff wrongly set the date.

Fig 1: registered cover sent from Bagan PO (Myanmar registration label pasted)

In November 2014, I have received some covers send from post offices outside of Yangon, all leaves Myanmar without the registration label with bar codes and no tracking number.  Singpost (Singapore Post) pasted the registration label (Fig 2), with the tracking number ending with SG, on the time the cover arrives to Singapore as it has no label.  The new process enable all covers have the registration label and tracking number ending with MM.  It could be pasted in Yangon mail sorting and Singpost do not paste any label on the recent covers. 
    
Fig 2: registered cover from Taunggyi PO with Singapore registration label

To reference this article, please cite:

Toe Kyaw Kyar, "New issues and developments: New registration processes (1)", The Burma Fantail, Vol. 12, No. 2, Whole Number 44, pp. 21, April 2015.

Foreign Post cancellation, Yangon-CME postmark



Recently, I have travelled to Myanmar and send some covers to Singapore.  When the letters arrives back to me, I notice that Myanmar Post used two new postmarks on the covers.  The best example is the cover sent from Nyaung Oo post office (Fig 1), it was struck with Nyaung Oo PO postmark on 5th Jan, new Foreign Post postmark of Yangon on 8th Jan and Yangon-CME mark dated 8th Jan.  


Fig 1: Two new postmarks on the stamp
"Foreign Post" postmark (Fig 2) seems to be the replacement of old "Foreign Air Mail" postmark (Fig 3).  "Foreign Post" mark is in a double circle format; the date shown in the center with two stars on the sides.  It is struck in blue, except the date in red.  Its outer diameter is about 4 cm and inner circle is about 2.8 cm.  It is usually struck on the stamp.  Another never seen mark is "Yangon CME" mark (Fig 4), usually struck on the back of the cover.  CME here stands for Central Mail Exchange, which used to be known as Sorting.  "Yangon-CME" mark is struck in black.  Its format is a double circle with the date in the center.  Its outer diameter is around 3.5 cm and inner diameter is around 2.5 cm.  

Fig 2: Foreign Post mark
Fig 3: Foreign Air Mail postmark
Fig 4: Yangon-CME postmark

It is not found on the covers sent from the Mayangon Post Office and Bayint Naung Market Post Office which are in Yangon region.  I found these marks on the covers sent from Nyaung Oo, Bagan, Pyin Oo Lwin, and Chaung Thar Post Offices.

To reference this article, please cite:

Toe Kyaw Kyar, "New issues and developments: Foreign Post cancellation, Yangon-CME postmark", The Burma Fantail, Vol. 12, No. 2, Whole Number 44, pp. 20-21, April 2015.

Tuesday 7 April 2015

Myanmar Theme (1) - Chess

Chess is played all over the world, and also in Myanmar.  People in Myanmar play both international chess and Myanma Traditional Chess.  It is even one of the sport in SEAP games and SEA games.  Some special chess pieces related to Myanmar can be seen on the stamps of Equatorial Guinea.  The 8 stamps set issued in 1976 contains two stamps that depicting Myanmar chess piece.  One of its, 8EK valued, is showing the Bishop piece and stating "Bishop - Chinese/Burmese" in red background.  Another, valued 30EK, shows Knight (Horse) with description "Knight - Burmese 19th Centuary".  In Myanma Traditional Chess (Sit Tu Yin), the knight is horse, same as international chess.  But, bishop is different.  Bishop is an elephant in Myanma Traditional Chess.  Based on this fact, we can conclude the images shown are not from Myanma Traditional Chess.  These may be some international chess pieces played in Myanmar.

       

Cindrella stamps in chess theme with the country name of Myanmar are also available in the market.  The denominations are described in MM Kyats and the country name is printed as "Union of Myanmar".  The stamps are struck with the fake postmark with the text "Union of Myanmar, Yangon" without date.  Myanma Post and Telecommunication announces that all these stamps are illegals.  The list of illegal stamps of Myanmar can be seen at (http://www.pwmo.org/Illegals/frame-illegals-en.htm).  In this article, the illegal stamps in chess theme will be mentioned.
In 2001, 9 types of Souvenir Sheets named Kings of Chess, and 3 types of SS named Kings and Chess.  All stamps are denominated at 300 Kyats and shows the famous chess players. 

In the same year, two types of stamps sheetlet with 9 stamps each was spread in the market.  One is horizontal type and one is vertical type.  The values of stamps in each sheetlet are two 10 Kyats, two 20 Kyats, one 50 Kyats, two 100 Kyats and two 200 Kyats.  As these are illegals, these cannot be used to post a mail, but were purchased by Cindrella Stamps Collectors.




In Burmese



နိုင္ငံတကာ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားေပၚက ျမန္မာ (၁) း စစ္တုရင္

ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳး တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းစုေဆာင္းသူတို႔၊ ျမန္မာကို စိတ္၀င္စားေသာ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းစုေဆာင္းသူတို႔ အတြက္ရည္ရြယ္ျပီး နိုင္ငံတကာ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားေပၚက ျမန္မာ အမည္ရွိ ေဆာင္းပါးမ်ားကို ေရးသားသြားပါမယ္။  ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအပါအ၀င္ နိုင္ငံတကာမွ ထုတ္ေ၀ထားေသာ ျမန္မာအေၾကာင္းအရာပါ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားအေၾကာင္းကို တင္ျပသြားမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။  ယခုတစ္ပတ္မွာေတာ့ နိုင္ငံတကာ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားေပၚမွ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသံုး စစ္တုရင္ရုပ္မ်ားႏွင့္ စစ္တုရင္ အေၾကာင္းအရာပါ ျမန္မာတံဆိပ္ေခါင္း အတုမ်ား အေၾကာင္း ကိုတင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

စစ္တုရင္ အားကစားနည္းကို နိုင္ငံတကာမွာေရာ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံမွာပါ က်ယ္ျပန္႔စြာ ကစားၾကပါတယ္။  ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံမွာေတာ့ နိုင္ငံတကာ စစ္တုရင္ ကစားနည္းအျပင္ ျမန္မာ့ရိုးရာ စစ္တုရင္ကိုပါ ကစားၾကပါတယ္။  ျမန္မာ့ ရိုးရာ စစ္တုရင္ ေခၚ စစ္ဘုရင္ ကစားနည္းကို အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ အားကစားၿပိဳင္ပြဲမွာလဲ ထည့္သြင္းယွဥ္ျပိဳင္ေစပါတယ္။  စစ္တုရင္ကစားနည္းမွာ အသံုးျပဳတဲ႔ အရုပ္မ်ားကုိ အာဖရိကတိုက္ Equatorial Guinea နိုင္ငံထုတ္ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားေပၚမွာ ေတြ႔ျမင္ရပါတယ္။  ၁၉၇၆ ခုႏွစ္ထုတ္ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္း ၈ လံုးပါအစံုမွ ၂ လံုးကို ျမန္မာစစ္တုရင္ရုပ္အျဖစ္ ေဖၚျပထားပါတယ္။  8 EK တန္ဖိုးရွိ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမွာ အနီေရာင္ေနာက္ခံေပၚတြင္ ဘုန္းၾကီးရုပ္ ရိုက္ႏွိပ္ထားျပီး Bishop - Chinese/Burmese ဟုေရးသားေဖၚျပ ပါရွိပါတယ္။  ေနာက္တစ္လံုးမွာ အစိမ္းေရာင္ေနာက္ခံ ျမင္းရုပ္ျဖစ္ျပီး 30 EK တန္ဖိုးရွိပါတယ္။  Knight – Burmese 19th Century ဟုေရးသားထားပါတယ္။  ျမန္မာ့ရိုးရာ စစ္တုရင္ကစားနည္းတြင္ Knight မွာ ျမင္းရုပ္ပင္ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ Bishop မွာ ဆင္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။  ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ ယခုတံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားေပၚမွ အရုပ္မ်ားဟာ ျမန္မာ့ရိုးရာ စစ္တုရင္ကစားနည္းမွ အရုပ္မ်ားမဟုတ္ၾကပါ။  ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံတြင္အသံုးျပဳခဲ႔ေသာ နိုင္ငံတကာ စစ္တုရင္ကစားနည္းမွ အရုပ္မ်ားဟု သံုးသပ္မိပါတယ္။  ေဖၚျပထားေသာ စစ္တုရင္ရုပ္မ်ားမွာ ျမန္မာမႉလက္ရာမ်ား မပါရွိေသာ္လည္း ေရးသားေဖၚျပခ်က္မ်ားအရ ဤေဆာင္းပါးတြင္ ထည့္သြင္း မွတ္တမ္းတင္ရပါသည္။

        


စစ္တုရင္ အေၾကာင္းအရာျဖင့္ ျမန္မာတံဆိပ္ေခါင္း အတုမ်ားလည္း ေစ်းကြက္တြင္ ထြက္ရွိခဲ႔ပါေသးတယ္။  တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားေပၚတြင္ "Union of Myanmar" ျပည္ေထာင္စု ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံဟု ရိုက္ႏွိပ္ထားျပီး တန္ဘိုးမ်ားကို ျမန္မာက်ပ္ေငြမ်ားျဖင့္ ေဖၚျပထားပါတယ္။  တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားကို စက္၀ိုင္းပံု Union of Myanmar, Yangon တံဆိပ္တံုးျဖင့္ ရိုက္ႏွိပ္ထားျပီး ရက္စြဲမပါရွိပါ။  ျမန္မာ့ဆက္သြယ္ေရးမွ ထိုတံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားအား တရားမ၀င္ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ား (အတုမ်ား) အျဖစ္ ေၾကျငာခဲ႔ပါတယ္။  ထိုစဥ္ကထြက္ရွိခဲ႔ေသာ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္း အတုမ်ား စာရင္းကို (http://www.pwmo.org/Illegals/frame-illegals-en.htm) တြင္ေလ့လာနိုင္ပါတယ္။  ယခုေဆာင္းပါးတြင္ စစ္တုရင္အေၾကာင္းအရာပါ ျမန္မာတံဆိပ္ေခါင္း အတုမ်ားကို တင္ျပပါမည္။

၂၀၀၁ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စစ္တုရင္ ဘုရင္မ်ား ဟုအမည္ေပးထားသည့္ Souvenir Sheets မ်ိဳးႏွင့္ စစ္တုရင္ႏွင့္ဘုရင္မ်ားဟု အမည္ေပးထားသည့္ Souvenir Sheets မ်ိဳး၊ စုစုေပါင္း ျမန္မာတံဆိပ္ေခါင္းအတု ၁၂ မ်ိဳး ထြက္ရွိခဲ႔ပါတယ္။  တန္ဖိုးက်ပ္ ၃၀၀ ရိုက္ႏွိပ္ထားျပီး နာမည္ေက်ာ္ စစ္တုရင္ကစားသမားမ်ား၏ ရုပ္ပံုႏွင့္ ၄င္းတို႔၏အမည္မ်ား ေဖၚျပပါရွိပါတယ္။
 
 

၂၀၀၁ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ပင္ ျမန္မာတံဆိပ္ေခါင္းအတု ၉ လံုးပါ Sheetlet ၂ မ်ိဳးလည္းထြက္ရွိခဲ႔ပါတယ္။  ေထာင္လိုက္အေနအထားတစ္မ်ိဳးႏွင့္ အလ်ားလိုက္ အေနအထား တစ္မ်ိဳးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။  ၂မ်ိဳးစလံုးတြင္ ပါရွိေသာ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္း တန္ဖိုးမ်ားမွာ ၁၀ က်ပ္တန္ ၂ လံုး၊ ၂၀ က်ပ္တန္ ၂ လံုး၊ ၅၀ က်ပ္တန္ ၁ လံုး၊ ၁၀၀ က်ပ္တန္ ၂ လံုး၊ ၂၀၀ က်ပ္တန္ ၂ လံုး ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။  ထိုတံဆိပ္ေခါင္းမ်ားမွာ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းအတုမ်ားျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ စာပို႔ရာတြင္ အသံုးျပဳမရနိုင္ပါ။  သို႔ရာတြင္ တံဆိပ္ေခါင္းအတု စုေဆာင္းသူမ်ား (Cindrella Stamps Collectors) က ၀ယ္ယူစုေဆာင္း တက္ၾကပါသည္။