After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, badges showing an image of Mao were produced mainly for special occasions, for example Chinese soldiers were given star-shaped badges with a portrait of Mao when they returned to China from the Korean War, and labourers working on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway were given gold-plated copper badges with a bilingual inscription in Chinese and Tibetan on completion of the road in December 1954. By the mid-1960s Mao badges began to become more prevalent, and were even distributed at international events such as the 1965 Leipzig Trade Fair, but it was not until the end of 1965 that small aluminium Mao badges, similar to the Cultural Revolution badges, first started to be produced in Shanghai.