Postage stamps and postal history of British Columbia Postage stamps and postal history of British Columbia The postage stamps and postal history of British Columbia started in 1860 with the issue of a single brownish-rose stamp depicting Queen Victoria in profile and denominated as 2½ pence. It was issued jointly by Vancouver Island and British Columbia as each colony had insufficient postal trade to justify printing separate stamps. In 1862, Vancouver Island adopted decimal currency and sold the stamp for 5 cents, before issuing its own 5 and 10 cent stamps in September 1865. Meanwhile, British Columbia had increased the postal rate to 3 pence but continued to
Denomination (postage stamp) existing denominations became worthless. In other cases, changes to the local currency have led to changes in denomination. For instance, when the Ryukyu Islands (at the time a United States protectorate) changed its currency from Yen to Dollars, a number of airmail stamps originally printed with Yen values were overprinted and re-denominated to cents in 1959–1960. During periods of hyperinflation, non-overprinted postage stamps of extraordinary denominations have been issued. As one example, in Hungary, on 15 July 1946 a AP40,000 (Hungarian adópengő) stamp featuring a diesel locomotive was issued. This was the equivalent of 80 quadrillion pengő (P80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) Denomination (postage