After retirement, he specialized in collecting bus and boat tickets

Song liked collecting when he was young. After retiring, he put his entire mind into making collections. He said: "I just collected stamps at first, and later I got a ticket from the 1950s by accident. Then I found there are advertisements printed on tickets, which has aroused my interest of collecting them". Song Danyou said that when he encountered any special tickets at a collection market in later time, he would buy them.

Song said that the he only collected the tickets throughout the country at first. Then he saw the ticket exhibition prepared by the Chongqing Association of Collectors and accepted their suggestion: to collect the local tickets in series.

Coppery cable tickets are very rare

The tickets collected by Song Dayou cover a variety of transportation types: waterways, highways, bridges, cableways and rail transit. There are copper Wanglongmen Cable tickets, ferry tickets, boat towing tickets, tricycle tickets, bus tickets, bridge crossing tickets, bus bulletin tickets, ropeway tickets and rail transit tickets nowadays.

From the "ticket changes" booklet, the reporter found a great sense of history from the tickets that date from the 1940s up to today. The earlier tickets are discoloring and even turning shabby, while the recent tickets are more and more beautiful.

Song said that the rarest one is copper cable tickets. This copper ticket looks like a coin, being quadrate with a round hole in the middle. There are characters "cable car" on one side and "ticket down, the 37 year of Republic of China" on the other side.

According to Song, this kind of rare copper cable car ticket is the oldest kind of traffic tickets he collected. The rest of the bus and car tickets are mostly paper-made. Tickets are written in black ink on white paper in old days, later colored advertising tickets appeared. Now, they are replaced by rail transit card tickets.

Song Dayou said: "With the traffic cards in use nowadays, the [paper] tickets are increasingly rare. So these tickets are the historical evidence of traffic development in Chongqing." (Translated by Shi Yali, Fathom Language Limited)