Philatelic Friday: Vietnam Unified

So yeah, it's been quite a while since my last Philatelic Friday post, but what's a year here or there? I was spurred on by finding an old binder (a Mead Organizer with a puppy and kitten on it--total 80's style) full of more stamps (it's funny how I don't even remember having collected so many). I have several sheets with stamps from different countries and this Vietnamese stamp caught my interest with its rather contemporary design and great color scheme.

1976 Vietnam

It didn't occur to me how difficult it would be to pin down some information on the stamp. Searching the text brought up lots of Vietnamese language pages which wasn't too helpful. Finally I pinned down this page and translated it to find that this seems to be half of a stamp set issued in 1976 marking the re-unification of the country. According to this Wikipedia page about the postal history of Vietnam, these must have been issued in July/August as it still has the name of the North Vietnamese state printed on them (the text along the top). The whole page is an interesting read as you consider that stamps were originally issued there in 1862 under French colonial rule and then there was a Northern and Southern state. Anyhow, that's a lot of history for a 12-cents stamp!