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* Circa 1970’s, this Tin Friction Sedan is very well made. A wonderful looking collectible. Produced in the later years of the Chinese tin toys era, these were made to be collected.

* Condition is New, Good Condition. Never been used or played with. Discovered in a defunct family store’s old inventory. However, item shows normal age and shelf wear.

There are some minor chips in the paint, a little rust on the tin and a small crease on the upper side of the box.

* Please see pictures for more details and feel free to ask any questions before purchasing.

* Cleaned and disinfected.

* Item comes from a smoke-free, pet free-home.

* Background

Courtesy of Tycho de Feyter who runs Carnewschina, a blog about cars in China, from Beijing, China. He also collects die-cast models of Chinese cars.

“The Chinese tin toy industry started in the early 1970′s and continued until the early 1990′s. When China started making tin toys, they mostly copied Japanese tin toys, just like the Japanese tin toy industry had started with copying British and German tin toys. Later on however, Chinese factories designed their very own toys, mostly based on early Chinese cars, trucks and all kind of weaponry.

Tin toy manufacturing was concentrated in two cities: Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghai had at least five factories, Beijing had only one. The factories didn’t have names. They had numbers. This was typical for the communist era, when bourgeois names all but disappeared, Mao even had a plan to replace people’s names with numbers. That fortunately never happened, but the rest of the Chinese society soon sounded like the map of Manhattan.

Instead of “let me out at sixty-third and third,” you had the ‘Beijing number-1 department store’, the ‘Shenzhen number-5 middle school’, the ‘Jilin number-3 shoe factory’ and so it went on and on. Many of these names still exist today. The tin toy factories in Shanghai were called ‘Shanghai toy factory no-1′ up until ‘Shanghai toy factory no-5′.

It is almost impossible to know in which factory a certain tin toy was made. There are no markings, no logo’s, no years, no brand-names. The only thing that helps is again — a number. All China-made tin toys were numbered with combinations like: MF-777, ME-666, MS-555 and some more. Unfortunately, these numbers are not exactly connected to factories, but to the sort of toy. MF are mostly cars and trucks, ME military vehicles and MS all kind of figures and dolls.”

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