2026 Year of the Horse Set of Cancelled Stamps

Cancelled set of four stamps.

$2.90 Lucky Peach - The peach symbolises a long and happy life, and in Chinese folklore it is used as an emblem of immortality. Displaying, eating or gifting a peach makes for a time-honoured lunar new year tradition. The peach is also used here to represent the contributions of fruit shops up and down the country. One standout name in particular is that of Jack Lum. His fruit and vegetable business has been operating in Reumuera, Auckland for over 50 years. While he might sell lucky peaches, it’s clear his enduring success comes from grit and hard work. 

$4.20 Good Food, Good Fortune - This stamp shows a baby sharing spring rolls with a horse. The spring roll has such a long tradition with spring festival (also known as the lunar new year) that it shares the name with it. While it may seem like a humble snack, the spring roll is associated with wealth and prosperity. This connection between good food and good fortune is not lost on artist Bev Moon. Her art depicts spring rolls, pork buns and wontons in knitted form. Her work weaves together stories about the courage and resilience of her ancestors with a love of food cooked and shared with family. 

$4.70 Giving and Receiving - In this stamp, horse and baby parade past lilies in bloom. Like many symbols associated with the Lunar New Year, these flowers represent good fortune and happiness. In her exhibition Tracing a Gilded Trail, artist Cindy Huang used lilies to honour the memory of the miners who first arrived in from China during the 19th-century gold rushes. Scant historical records remain, but it is understood that these men were subjected to great hardship and discrimination. Her installation consisted of hundreds of handmade porcelain lilies representing the real ones that flower annually near Round Hill, Murihiku Southland, once the southern-most Chinese settlement in the world.  

$7.60 Service is Success - The stamp shows a couple of jubilant cherubs and their prize kumara. The kumara here is a metaphor for Mangere couple Joe and Fay Gock, whose generous spirit impacted the community and the country. They have been growing vegetables together ever since they arrived as refugees in the 1950s. Responsible for many horticultural innovations, Fay and Joe developed patented polystyrene boxes for ice-packed vegetables, introduced the first seedless watermelons, put the first stickers on produce and, most importantly, developed a black rot-resistant kumara which saved the Northland kumara crop in the 1960s. In 2013 they won Horticulture New Zealand’s highest honour – the Bledisloe Cup. Joe was also awarded the Queen’s Service Medal in 2015 for his outstanding services to the community and to horticulture. 

This stamp issue celebrates the Chinese New Year in the Year of the Horse. Click here to find out more.

Check out the full range of stamp sets here.