Watching the endless stream of opportunistic issues, largely directed at gullible collectors, coming out from North Korea year after year, it is a pleasant philatelic experience to encounter something unexpected from this source. It has, of course, occurred in the recent past with the discovery of the domestic paper varieties – the ‘yellow paper’ issues – that still have to be fully documented. Some perforation varieties in modern issues have also been noted.
Other undocumented varieties are to be found as a result of the revision of postal rates in 2002. Revision is a euphemistic description of the situation; effective August 1, 2002, the rate for a domestic letter increased by a factor of 30(!) from 10chon to 3won – pity the poor aspirant capitalist who was hoping to accumulate a few won in the bank.
There is a possibility that Figure 2 imperf on non-glossy paper is cut from postcard.
The uprate from 10ch to 3won was effective from Aug 01, 2002. But from Dr. Maeda’s record, it seems there were still many covers after Aug 01, 2002 existed with only 10ch stamp affixed. So this uprate might be effective throughout the whole country “gradually”.
Fig. 1 is a good example of 2 types of domestic stamps, stamp before and after 1990 show different papers even both were domestic stamps. Of course imperf stamps can be used locally too, but if that’s the case, Fig 2 should be on glossy paper.