‘I’ll take everything’: Meet the 81-year-old behind Singapore’s last ‘pure stamp shop’
‘I’ll take everything’: Meet the 81-year-old behind Singapore’s last ‘pure stamp shop’
Tan Chun Lim has collected and dealt in stamps for 70 years. Today, his 46sqm shop at Peninsula Shopping Complex is filled with stamps, postcards and first-day covers – some dating back to the 1940s.
Chun Lim fell in love with stamps at 11, when collecting was all the rage. “Almost everybody collected stamps,” he recalled. At 14, he was already buying stamps in bulk and reselling them to schoolmates.
The stamp market boomed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Chun Lim remembers Singapore’s 1995 World Philatelic Exhibition being “as packed as sardines”. But from around 1997, interest began to fade.
Today, new stock often comes from people clearing their parents’ or grandparents’ homes. “I’m not like other buyers who just pick what they want – I’ll take everything. It will help the customers solve their problem.”
His customers are now mostly long-time regulars and serious collectors hunting for something highly specific – from printing errors to an exact postmark date. “When a collector wants something, I will find a way to get it for them.”
