Do you know the interesting story of the rare British Guiana stamp?

 

British Guiana is quite famous among philatelists for its early postage stamps, some of them considered to be among the rarest, most expensive stamps in the world. 

In 1966 the country achieved independence from the United Kingdom, and changed its name to Guyana. Later stamps were issued by Guyana. 

The first adhesive stamps produced by British Guiana were issued in 1850.

The unique British Guiana 1c magenta from 1856 is at this moment the most expensive stamp in the world. It took only two minutes for the British Guiana one-cent magenta stamp to be sold to an anonymous bidder, in 2014, for close to $1 million. 

The stamp, printed on magenta paper, bears a three-masted ship and the colony's motto, "We give and expect in return".

How did the British Guiana Stamp became so valuable?

Mainly because there are just one in existence today. It has a very interesting history, that began in 1855, when just 5,000 of an expected 50,000 stamps arrived from Great Britain to its colony of British Guiana on the northern coast of South America. The local postmaster realized that he was going to need a way to show the transaction of postage paid without the stamps.

So he decided to issue a provisional stamp to keep the mail moving until more postage could arrive from overseas. The only place that could create something with enough official cache to do the job in 1850s British Guiana was the local newspaper, the Royal Gazette.

So, the printer of the Gazette produced a stock of one-cent stamps (for newspapers) and four-cent stamps (for letters), attempting to imitate the design of government-issued postage, but adding to it an illustration of the ship and the colony’s Latin motto meaning “we give and we ask in return.”

The imitation worked and the postmaster moved quickly to remove them from circulation once they’d served their purpose (it's estimated about 10 weeks). 

The existence of the One-Cent Magenta would likely have been forgotten altogether had it not been for a 12-year-old Scottish boy named Vernon Vaughan, living in British Guiana, who found one odd stamp among his uncle’s papers in 1873. 

The peculiar stamp hardly struck the boy as very valuable, so he sold it for six shillings (about $10 in today’s dollars) and bought a packet of foreign stamps that he apparently found more aesthetically appealing. Thus began the exciting, decades-long, cross-continental journey of the One-Cent Magenta.