A touch of cultural glamor will once again be added to Dongguan's Humen Town as 
it hosts the Second Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) Philatelic 
Exhibition on August 26. Beyond promoting stamp-collecting, the exhilarating 
event, as the GBA's high-end cultural activity held at the national level, will 
also increase the cultural exchanges between cities in the region.

On top of a staggering exhibition area of 10,000 square meters housing 1,192 
exhibits, the exhibition features a 2,000-square-meter multifunctional hall for 
side events. Essentially a state-level gathering of competitive stamp displays, 
the event invites 750 exhibits from the GBA's philatelic associations, an 
increase of 300 exhibits from the previous session. And this would be the most 
appealing and much-awaited highlight. Completing this year's philatelic event 
is the show of over 50 types of rare postage stamps, outnumbering any previous 
Guangdong-hosted exhibition of this kind.

On the side of the four-day exhibition, a wide variety of non-competitive 
displays were held, said Wang Xiaoqiang, the office director of the secretariat 
for the exhibition's organizing committee. What merited attention, he 
continued, was how the debut of valuable antique stamps, such as the Penny 
Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, and the Dalong stamps, China's 
first set of stamps, and of postage stamps showcasing the GBA's urban landscape 
encouraged visitors to savor what these collections had to offer.

Besides the exciting philatelic exhibition, Humen has staged a raft of other 
events online and offline, including the Dongguan Shopping Festival and a 
creative night market, in August alone in a way that drives its economy and 
enables a booming consumer market. The spending of the town's businesses on 
promotion as a whole, expected to surpass the 10-million-yuan mark, will 
generate nearly 50 million yuan in sales of consumer goods.

By hosting an entirely new sort of philatelic exhibition, Humen promises to 
develop itself into a tourist resort with rich historical and cultural 
heritage, according to the town mayor Wu Qingqiu. That means the cultural feast 
will inspire the town to show its culture-rich image, boost consumption, and 
foster a stable economy.

Source: The Organizing Committee of the Philatelic Exhibition