The Chinese postal service is releasing a special edition of sweet and sour pork flavoured stamps to celebrate the year of the pig, which begins February 18.

The stamps feature a cutesy cartoon of a sow an her suckling piglets. Scratching and sniffing reveals what said piglets would smell like slow roasted and then covered in sugar, rice vinegar and monosodium glutamate.

According to Metro, the Royal Mail launched its own set of scratch and sniff stamps in 2001 which smelt of eucalyptus.

But since that triumph the UK stamp innovation bunker has laid idle, and now been humiliated by the Chinese taking olfactory postage technology to the next level: the glue on the back of their New Year stamps has been primed with the taste of sweet and sour pork too.

Which leaves us with one question: when oh when will the UK catch up with the Far East and release stamps which taste of the Queen? ®

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