1944 ROC Diplomatic Passport, Curaçao
The $3,000 Passport of a Diplomat’s Daughter: A 1944 Chinese Consular Document from Curaçao
There is no age listed anywhere on this passport, only a photograph of a young woman whose face suggests she had not yet reached adulthood. That gap in the paperwork is the first small mystery in a document that turns out to be full of them.
A Passport for a Diplomat’s Daughter
This 1944 Republic of China (ROC) diplomatic passport was issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Miss She Yu Li, daughter of the Chinese Consul stationed in Willemstad, Curaçao. Her father is named in the document as She Zambeh, also rendered Shi Chaobai in other sources (a common situation with Chinese names transliterated into Dutch and English records of the period, and one I would not try to resolve without the original Chinese characters in hand). The passport records her travels via India, Iraq, Egypt, South Africa, and Brazil, and through British and American ports, as she made her way to join her father at his post.
A Standard Passport Turned Diplomatic
What makes the physical document interesting is that it was not purpose-printed as a diplomatic passport. The Ministry took a standard passport, number 009249, stamped it DIPLOMATIC, and added the number 2725. It carries several travel entries and two renewals, extending its validity to August 1953, even though it was originally issued for just one year. Nowhere does the document state Miss She’s age. Given the passport photograph, my own guess is that she was a teenager at the time, though I want to be clear that this is an inference from the image, not something the passport itself confirms.
Britain Says Diplomat, America Says Something Else
The passport carries a British diplomatic visa along with immigration stamps from Curaçao and the United States, but the two Allied powers treated her status quite differently. Britain granted a diplomatic visa outright. The United States, by contrast, issued only an ordinary visa, annotated with the remark “Daughter of a Foreign Government Official.” That distinction is a small but telling window into how consular jurisdiction and diplomatic courtesy were applied unevenly, even among wartime allies, when the traveler was a dependent rather than the diplomat herself.
The Consulate at Willemstad
The ROC’s diplomatic presence in Curaçao was a recent creation at the time this passport was issued. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed no fewer than four consular officers to the post, including one vice-consul and two consuls-in-training, alongside the consul himself. Shi Chaobai arrived in December 1943 as the first Chinese consul assigned to the Dutch West Indies. He left Willemstad in June 1947 and was succeeded by acting consul Zhang Zenfu. For readers who want the fuller diplomatic context behind this posting, the historian Vincent K.L. Chang covers the Dutch-Chinese relationship of this era in detail in Forgotten Diplomacy: The Modern Remaking of Dutch-Chinese Relations, 1927–1950.
This kind of small, newly staffed consulate is exactly the sort of posting that produces unusual paperwork. If you enjoy tracking how consular offices in China itself issued documents to foreigners during roughly the same period, my piece on a passport issued by the British consul in Hankou for a missionary covers a comparable bureaucratic improvisation from the other direction, a Western consulate adapting its paperwork to local conditions in China.
What the Auction Revealed
As an active observer of the collectors’ market, I can say that this document was, at the time, the most expensive passport-related collectible to sell on eBay in 2022, closing at $3,000. The story did not end there: the buyer canceled the purchase, and the seller relisted the passport, which then sold for $2,200. Even at the reduced price, that relist still stood as the strongest result of 2022 in this category, to the best of my knowledge as of this writing, though auction results are always a moving target and I would not treat that ranking as permanent.
Documents like this one sell well precisely because they combine several of the factors collectors chase at once: an issuing government with a complicated diplomatic history, a personal rather than official traveler, and a layered set of visa endorsements that tell a story beyond the passport’s own text. I go into these value drivers more broadly in my guide to collecting historical passports, and if Chinese-issued and China-related travel documents interest you specifically, my writeup of a 1940 German passport issued in Tientsin, China makes for a good companion piece from a very different angle on the same region.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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