Don Juan Antonio Samaranch y Torelló, 1st Marquis of Samaranch, Grandee of Spain (17 July 1920 – 21 April 2010).

Served as the president of the International Olympic Committee for 21 years, he successfully promoted the commercialization of the Olympic Games and shook off the IOC out of the financial crisis. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, he presented China's first Olympic gold medal in history. He showed long-term concern and support for China's sports cause, and made great contributions to China's return to the International Olympic family in 1979 and China's successful bid for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. On April 21st, 2010, Samaranch died at age 89 in the Quiron Hospital in his home city of Barcelona, Spain.

On December 18th, 2018, the Party Central Committee and the State Council awarded the China reform friendship medals to Samaranch.

Hello, I'm Chen Yulong. The collection I'd like to introduce to you today is Samaranch’s postcards.

Talking about the Olympic Games, we all think of the scene of athletes struggling and sweating, or standing on the podium in tears. The origin can be traced back to Mr. Samaranch, who was elected president of the International Olympic Committee at the 83rd plenary session of the International Olympic Committee held in Moscow, USSR, in 1980.

Mr. Samaranch is a man of courage and perseverance. With 21 years' efforts, he had adopted the business sponsorship mode to turn the IOC into a vigorous and influential international organization, and the International Olympic movement into a world grand event with perfect combination of sports, economy, politics and other fields. It can be said that without Mr. Samaranch, there would be no modern Olympic Games. Mr. Samaranch is also an old friend of the Chinese people. China's first Olympic gold medal and the success of China's bid for the Olympic Games had deep ties with him. Mr. Samaranch has deep feelings for China. During his tenure, he not only successfully brought China and South Africa back to the Olympic family, continuously expanded the scale of the Olympic Games, but also made women more widely participate in the Olympic Games, professionalized the Olympic Games, and opened it to professional athletes, including the NBA of the United States, which greatly increased the bidding cities for the Olympic Games, as well as the commercial sponsorship and television broadcasting right fees for the Olympics.

This exhibition selects 200 postcards of Mr. Samaranch's initial footprint as IOC President, and shows them to the public. Nearly 200 postcards have become a series of history, a period of Mr. Samaranch's life track. During his 21 years as IOC President from 1980 to 2001, Mr. Samaranch visited 199 IOC members, took more than 2,700 flights and traveled as long as 4.8 million kilometers, equivalent to 114 times around the world. From Europe, where the Olympic games originated, to the vast expanse of Africa, from ancient and mysterious Asia to vast and fertile North America, from Oceania to the colorful South America, Mr. Samaranch left his footprints for the Olympics.

Every piece of the postcards sent by Mr. Samaranch to his family in Barcelona , not only reflected his busy work, but was also full of his missing for his family. Between the short words on the back of each postcard, his care and concern for the family was transmitted. During the time he was unable to accompany his family,  it was these postcards that told his family where he is, whether he is well and so on.

With the effort of the Samaranch family, more than 600 postcards sent by Samaranch finally gathered together and donated to Mr. Ching-Kuo Wu, curator of the Samaranch Memorial. Mr. Ching-Kuo Wu, the founder of XOM, selected nearly 200 pieces, trying to deeply understand the connotation of these world cultural heritage left by Samanranch, so that the Olympic spirit advocated by him can be inherited and carried forward.

Mr. Samaranch loved collecting all his life. Even after he retired as president of the International Olympic Committee in 2001, he still served as the chairman of Coin & Stamp Collecting Commission. After Bach was elected as the new president of the International Olympic Committee, at the beginning of 2014, Mr. Ching-Kuo Wu, who has the same collecting hobby as Samaranch, was appointed as the chairman of the Coin & Stamp Collecting Commission. Mr. Ching-Kuo Wu has preserved nearly 17000 pieces of the collections that Samaranch gave him before his death in the Samaranch Memorial Museum in Tianjin.