Overview

• Foreign Office archives, reported by NK News in October 2025, confirm Pyongyang produced the commemoratives without authorization for sale to international collectors.
• Four stamps appeared roughly two months after the couple’s July 1981 wedding.
• The designs used official wedding photographs, including at least one by Lord Lichfield that was reproduced without permission.
• A British diplomat in Beijing first spotted the set in an English-language North Korean publication and called it “pretty excessive even for them.”
• Officials sought specimens for the Royal Philatelic Collection but found them only via dealer Stanley Gibbons within a £600 royal-wedding set, with further DPRK issues following in 1982 for the first anniversary, Prince William’s birth and Diana’s 21st birthday.