Manchurian visa inside a British passport
War-time Swiss protection endorsements issued at Beijing & Shanghai....
A selection of Manchurian visas
And a brief biography of a diplomat. September 18th 1931 was a crucial date in the history of modern China. From this month onwards, starting with Asia and ending with Europe, events would spiral from a regional conflict into a world war. The above mentioned date marks the Japanese invasion of North-Eastern China, a region known as Manchuria (a point needs to be made here: prior to the invasion, the Japanese had an enclave in the Dalian peninsula, Port Arthur, called Guan Dong Zhou Ting...
Important early NKVD signed passport
1922 Polish passport hand signed by NKVD would-be chief Genrikh Yagoda. Though not one of the first to appear from this young independent republic, formed after World War One, it has its appealing features. The passport was issued at the relatively new Polish consulate in Moscow, USSR, which was established following the Riga Treaty of March 1921. Formal relations were established on April 27, followed by the opening of diplomatic missions in...
Outstanding Diplomatic passport for Beijing
One of the earliest official passports used for the PRC. Early 1950 issued passport for Beijing. Used during the Korean War and at the height of the Cold War as well....
Another NKVD related travel document
being a Polish temporary internal passport from Samarkand....
Superb ambassador’s passport to North Korea
Outstanding diplomatic passport issued at the height of the Korean War. When one collects old passports and travel documents, one always tries to find the best and the rarest of items, and the item here can be considered as such. One of the most secluded and mysterious countries today, which...
The Holocaust in Albania
Liberation laissez-passer for a Jewess. 1945 Issued travel document...
Amazing set of papers used to escape France
WW2 passports, ID's & laissez-passer for a Polish soldier. The Second World War is full of fascinating stories, mixed with tales of heroism and of terror. Today these stories are kept in the form of witnessed verbal accounts and also in the form of documentation. Various archives, public and private, have stored for future generations a large...
1922 Polish NANSEN certificate
Used 3 years later for British Palestine....
MI6 agent who issued lifesaving visas – Turkey WW2
A diplomat who did the right thing. By now we are all familiar with the Righteous among the Nations, those individuals who put their life at risk and issued all the assistance possible, at the time, in order to do the right thing, showed us all that humanity does have its finest hour....