Sunday 3 May 2020

Date slugs in Burmese

All the post offices throughout Burma were distributed with slugs in Burmese for the year part of postmarks since January 1986.  The following two telephone bill payments receipts from Kyonpyaw Post Office shows the Sep 1985 postmark with year slug in English and Jan 1986 postmark with year slug in Burmese.
Most post offices used year date slugs since then.  The following examples shows Botataung Registered postmark dated 8 Jul 1996 and Moulmein College postmark dated 24 Oct 1986.  Both examples have the year slugs in Burmese.
At the major post offices like Yangon GPO are provided with all date slugs in Burmese.  The following postmark from Yangon GPO dated 9 Jun 1997 used all date slugs in Burmese.

But earlier than that, there are some usages of Burmese Wording in the date portion of postmarks.  Interestingly all the examples I have seen are from Rakhine Division (Arakan Division) ရခိုင်တိုင်း in Burmese.  The copies in my collection are Taungup (Taungoke) dated 8 Dec 196x and Myebon dated 28 Aug 196x and are in sue since 1960s.


Telegraph marking with Burmese words may be precursor of such postmarks.  The following examples of telegraph marking stamp are from Central Telegraphic Office, Yangon dated 26 Feb 1962 and Taik Kyi dated xx Jan 1966.


My previous article on inverted date slugs shows how the postmark device and date slugs looks like.  Please browse the article at this link. Following the 1986 year slugs, the next change of postmark is the usages of shiny postmark which are totally in English. I will write another article to cover them up. 

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