The Hongkong Post Special Report (South China Morning Post, August 25) illustrates and describes as a collector's item a $50 millennium postage stamp produced with 22-carat-gold foil.
The report also describes another issue for the Year of the Dragon with gold and silver foil on two of the stamps in the set. One million sets were said to have been snapped up last year.
In my letter to these columns on January 8, 1997, I mentioned that labels printed as 'postage stamps' could not be classified as postage stamps if they were not put on general sale for a postal purpose, and accordingly, they would not normally be collected by philatelists.
The gold-foil stamps cannot be for a postal purpose because the purchaser is paying for the gold and not for the postal service supposedly represented by the stamps.
Who would be foolish enough to put a gold-foil stamp on an envelope and post it?
Metal-foil stamps are not new. They were introduced in the 1960s by a foreign philatelic agent who had obtained control of the postage-stamp issues of both Sierra Leone and Tonga.