Yacht issue

Millions of stamps were produced and they were the principal means of postage for all German imperial overseas possessions in the years 1900–1915.

They belonged to the Universal Postal Union and used the same postage rates as the mainland German Empire.

Redolent of the imperial grandeur of the Kaiser, the yacht was used as a symbol of German power and prestige.

The Kaiser had embarked on a quest to expand worldwide and by 1898 was rapidly building his navy to compete with other world powers, particularly Great Britain.

[2] The "Yachts" were first released in 1900 and remained the standard postal design for all German colonial mail until shortly after the outbreak of the First World War.

After the drying process was complete, the irregular contraction of the paper would sometimes cause the finished stamps to have designs of slightly different size.

Together they provided the large Yachts with a visual uniformity across colonies because the font size would always be roughly the same, in contrast to the small design.

Because the size of the blank scrolls could not be altered, significant changes to font size and structure were necessary to accommodate colony names of varying length: German Southwest Africa stood out from other issues for its tightly cramped letters, while Togo and Samoa required decorative emblems to fill in the yawning blank spaces around their names.

Following Allied occupation in the First World War, the German colonies had their stamps seized, but most were rereleased within a few days.