The Year of the Tiger in 2010 featured an updated tiger with hands on hips, while the more traditional dragon ruled on a postage stamp issued in France.
"For the price to go up to 500 yuan is a piece of cake," says Yu Yanping, a senior stamp dealer at Madian. He says the dragon stamps from the last two cycles have performed really well in the market. (The zodiac cycle is 12 years, so the last two Dragon years were in 2000 and 1988.)
A set of 80 dragon stamps from 1988 sells for about 3,000 yuan now, while a set of 32 stamps from 2000 is valued at more than 5,000 yuan.
Geng Shouzhong, author of the international award-winning Encyclopedia Knowledge of Chinese Philately, explains that in 2000, the Year of the Dragon coincided with a significant year in the Gregorian calendar, and many Chinese used the dragon stamps to post letters to mark the occasion. That left a limited number of mint-condition stamps, those valued most by traders and collectors.
Geng, with his 60 years of stamp-collecting experience, believes the price hike of the newly released dragon stamps is a mirage, as it is still untested by time.
Above all, Geng says the ultimate value of the stamp depends on how many were produced and how many tradable units are left over time.
These are the two main factors that help create valuable "legendary" stamps.
The monkey zodiac stamp released in 1980 was the first in the series released in China. Each monkey stamp can now fetch more than 10,000 yuan, and a complete set of 80 stamps will easily cost more than one million yuan.
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