COLONIAL MALAYA (SINGAPORE) on 1 September 1948 issued a definitive series of First Day Cover stamp sees depicting a profile of British King George VI. The initial design with the image of King George VI was replaced in 1954 with the image of Queen Elizabeth II.
This particular design in British Malaya underwent a convoluted transition from a pre-war British colony, through the Japanese Occupation and post-war British military rule, to the Cold War era leading up to independence.
It is the only design to have been adapted for use throughout the Malay peninsula including Singapore, and even saw action beyond Malaya’s shores in World War II.
It featured a pair of the coconut palms that grow prolifically throughout rural southeast Asia, framed in the corners by the stylised thatched roof of traditional southeast-Asian dwellings comprising leaves of the attap palm (Nypa fruticans). The design symbolised the idyllic kampong (village) life of bygone days in the tropical paradise and served as a window to the world before our time.
These coconut definitives would live through the reigns of three British monarchs (KGV, KGI and QEII) from 1936 to 1957, seeing three different currencies over time—the Straits Dollar, the Malayan Dollar and the Malaya and British Borneo Dollar (ringgit). Variants in design detail, colour, denomination, watermark, paper, perforation, overprint and other parameters ran into the hundreds.
For the very first time, ‘MALAYA’ appeared on the stamps of the Straits Settlements, marking a historical turning point and foretelling the future administrative unification of a culturally heterogeneous Malaya that would kindle the astonishing diversification of the coconut definitives.
The coconut definitive was an epitome of De La Rue's "stylised pictorialism" (Finlay 1974), developed to fit the constrained space of small-format letterpress.
For more on this series, see the article by Lin Yangchen
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