Entering Wang Zhuguo's home, visitors will be surprised to find his bedroom, the largest in his apartment, filled with biscuit tins: beside the bed, on the cupboard and under the table.

However, Wang, who lives in Qionghai, South China's Hainan Province, does not run a store.

The cans are filled with stamps, postcards and envelopes, which Wang, 67, has collected since he was in primary school.

Wang has pursued his hobby for more than half a century. His collection includes a variety of stamps, postal products and postcards. Some envelopes bear postmarks that indicate they were sent from China to the United States during the World War II.

Any of his thematic sets could easily be an exhibit in a philately exhibition.

His most precious collection is dragon stamps issued all over the world.

The rarest stamp in this collection is a set of some 20 dragon stamps, issued in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). He spent some 2,000 Singapore dollars (US$1,167) on the stamps when he revisited his birthplace of Singapore in 1987. Wang left Singapore as a child when his family returned to China.

He has experienced excitement when acquiring good stamps over the past more than 50 years. But tragedy struck in 1973, when a typhoon destroyed his apartment building and some of his most precious stamps.

Among the envelopes, one was sent to the United States, and bears the seals of the military management department during the World War II.

Wang said that he has had more time to devote to his beloved collections since he retired five years ago. Wang worked as an offical at the local municipal Party committee before retirement.

He not only collects, but also spends a lot of time conducting research to find out more information about his collections.

He spends entire days in the local library, browsing through all the books that offer information and history related to his stamps.

He asks local teachers for advice when he does not understand the foreign languages on his stamps.

In the past 10 years, he has devoted a lot of time to researching dragon stamps. He has tried to find out all sorts of things related to dragons, for instance, the origin of the dragon, its evolution and changing images, and the relation between dragon and imperial power.

He has also learnt about the dragon dance, dragon boats, dragon names, paintings, coins, etc.

Such studies are costly and time-consuming, said Wang.

"I checked the telephone directory and found 900 post offices which have the word "dragon" in their names, so I sent them letters to obtain postmarks from them.

"Although I wrote several times, some offices didn't answer me. So far, I've collected about 700 postmarks," he added.

Recently, he has begun to delve into stamps related to the moon and waterfalls.

Before his study of dragons, Wang had already written a book on architecture and the stamps he has collected on the theme of architecture. His work - both the dissertation and the stamps - has been displayed and won several local philately awards, with the book "Art of Architecture" ready to be printed.

But he has yet to publish the book. Once he sent the manuscript to a publishing house, but the company asked for 70,000 yuan (US$8,500) in advance.

Wang had to give up the idea of publishing his book, because he has few savings.

Although he has won many prizes, both at local and national level, over his many years of stamp collecting - including from the All-China Philatelic Federation in 2002 - he has spent most of his savings on the stamps.

He regrets that his only son has no interest in his collections.

Wang is happy that his grandson, now at primary school, is keen on painting.

"Maybe my grandson's fate is linked with stamp collecting, so I am pinning my hopes on him," Wang said.

(China Daily August 10, 2004)