# is this a pontil scar？



## haide

Hi,is it a pontil scar on the base of a huge cobalt blue bottle,a bit too small for the body size?and another one on a small piece.and please give me some prise advices.，thank you！


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## mctaggart67

On the cobalt, no. On the other, yes.


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## RIBottleguy

I'm gonna say no and no.  Typically an open pontil mark will be sharp to the point where you can usually cut your finger on it.


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## nhpharm

No on both...neither of these has a pontil scar.  Maybe $20.00 on the large bottle.  The clear bottle is worth maybe $1-2.


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## haide

I see…
have alot to study，thank you！


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## mctaggart67

Sure that's not some sort of iron/sand pontil mark on the clear?


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## haide

Maybe I'll take it then get some detailed photos.


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## RIBottleguy

The small one needs a good washing, it could be a pontil, but I can't say I've ever seen one that small before on a bottle that size.  Looks like a smooth indentation.


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## haide

Having viewed tens of thousands of antique Chinese bottles selling on the net，this small one is the only one functional bottle found with a suspected pontil mark，I'm wondering did not us use pontil those days？


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## cannibalfromhannibal

My vote is pontiled on both. I didn't think so on the cobalt one at first but on second glance it looks like it was twisted off and re-fired, which was usually done only on higher end wares. The shape also looks pontil era, though could be foreign made, making it a bit later. The clear one looks pontiled though likely a solid rod pontil, not a blowpipe. The interesting thing that caught my eye is the string tied to the neck- many of the un-embossed pontiled bottles had tags attached to the neck with the label info. and price.


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## CanadianBottles

Neither looks like any sort of base marking I've ever seen, but since they come from China I'm not surprised.  I'd imagine that they were probably using some fairly different techniques for glassmaking over there than they were here.  Mind you I've seen a fair amount of Chinese bottles on the west coast and none of them looked even remotely like that as well, but these are probably earlier than the ones I was seeing.


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## haide

Thank you for the further analysis.

I still have 2 questions：Is the scar a bit too small to the body size?
What happened to the invisible seems on the blue piece,have been polished?

By the way，I missed the clear one but the cobalt is still there，I'd like to take it if it's probably a pontiled one.


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## haide

The clear one is in a common style of Chinese medicine bottles before 1950s，the blue one is not that conmmon to me too.I found a picture shows a similar fuzzy hazy ponti scar，are they comparable？


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## CanadianBottles

If it was a Western bottle, the scar would absolutely be too small for the bottle, but it also looks like a pontil of some sort, so it very well could be a pontil in some sense of the word.

One thing to take into consideration, though, is that the fact that it may have a pontil doesn't necessarily mean that much since it's an Asian bottle.  Bottles made in North America with a pontil are valued at a premium because it means that they probably date to around the American Civil War or earlier.  I really doubt that one is anywhere near that old.  Glassmaking techniques varied wildly between different countries, so for example the bottles being made in 1920 in England looked like the bottles being made in 1870 in the U.S.  Some bottles currently being made in Eastern Europe look like the bottles that were being made in 1920 in the U.S.  Since I don't have any knowledge of Chinese glassblowing techniques, and probably neither does anyone else here, evaluating a bottle based on how it was made is very difficult.  I personally wouldn't spend very much on this bottle, especially considering the chip/crack in the lip.  If it had embossing or a label it would be a different matter, but I wouldn't spend more than five dollars (that's 25 yuan according to Google) on it even if it was undamaged.


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## CanadianBottles

No that pontil you posted (which is a really weird one, I've never seen one like that) isn't really comparable to the blue bottle.  If the blue bottle does have a pontil, which I'm not sure if it does, it's that little dot in the centre of the base.


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## sandchip

I don't see a pontil mark on either.  And there is no "twisted off" pontil scar.  What you are seeing is where the gaffer rotated the blowpipe to gather glass which is then clipped off by his apprentice, inserted into the mold and blown.  If the gather is a little stiff, that swirl won't completely disappear as it is blown against the mold surface.  What many folks call ground lines are also gather lines as well.  Many times on good examples, you can follow them 'round and 'round from neck to base.  Something happens to the temper of the glass as the gather is rolled on the marver that causes the glass to weather differently in the ground, causing those lines to become more noticeable, hence the misnomer "ground lines".  I've seen many bottles that have never been in the ground that have those same lines.  Also, the indentation on the rectangular example looks like a large bubble that burst sometime during blowing while the glass was still hot enough for the bubble edge to melt back in on itself.


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## haide

CanadianBottles：Your full introduction here confirms my guess，which is world's glass technologies are divied by time and space,it's really necessary to do some individual research national.Unfortunately I haven't found any detailed informations of technology of Chinese functional glass bottles yet，maybe I should dig deeper.I give up this piece for now,it's more than 10 times of your suggestion.(by the way,5 dollars equals 32 yuan here now~) 

Sandchip:That's really a specific interpretion.There is one thing I still don't understand:since it is a "tail" of the glass gather,it should be a protrusion of the gather surface，means it would be pushed onto the mold base in the first time，even if it’s a little stiff to be flattened，it shouldn't be a depression at all in my mind，but we can find that it is a sag in the photo？


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## cannibalfromhannibal

sandchip said:


> I don't see a pontil mark on either.  And there is no "twisted off" pontil scar.  What you are seeing is where the gaffer rotated the blowpipe to gather glass which is then clipped off by his apprentice, inserted into the mold and blown.  If the gather is a little stiff, that swirl won't completely disappear as it is blown against the mold surface.  What many folks call ground lines are also gather lines as well.  Many times on good examples, you can follow them 'round and 'round from neck to base.  Something happens to the temper of the glass as the gather is rolled on the marver that causes the glass to weather differently in the ground, causing those lines to become more noticeable, hence the misnomer "ground lines".  I've seen many bottles that have never been in the ground that have those same lines.  Also, the indentation on the rectangular example looks like a large bubble that burst sometime during blowing while the glass was still hot enough for the bubble edge to melt back in on itself.



Well, I don't know about all that as I have had decanters with an apparently twisted pontil scar and refired on some and others not. I see no such evidence to the contrary and will leave it at that. I also realize we have come a long way from the earlier days of collecting on figuring out what went on in the early glassmaking, but to say with certainty that that is the case is a rather bold assumption considering the numerous variety of possibilities. That aside, I had no reason to figure this guy is from China which makes anything possible. Guess I'll go jump back into my hole and continue digging and just leave this page to you "experts."


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## Bass Assassin

Hey Jack, are you finding anything?


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## CanadianBottles

haide said:


> CanadianBottles：Your full introduction here confirms my guess，which is world's glass technologies are divied by time and space,it's really necessary to do some individual research national.Unfortunately I haven't found any detailed informations of technology of Chinese functional glass bottles yet，maybe I should dig deeper.I give up this piece for now,it's more than 10 times of your suggestion.(by the way,5 dollars equals 32 yuan here now~)



You're thinking of American dollars, Canadian dollars aren't worth as much.  And yeah ten times that is WAY too much for that bottle.  It's pretty rare for a bottle without any words on it to be worth that much.  It would have to be very old.  Since there probably aren't very many Chinese bottle collectors, and value is determined by demand, it won't be often that you'll come across any bottle actually worth that much.  Where I'm from, on Vancouver Island, fifty dollars could buy several really nice Chinese bottles at a collectibles sale.  They may have been somewhat undervalued there though, because no one could read what was written on them.  I've got a couple Chinese medicine bottles, one of which I dug myself, but I have no idea what was in them or who made them because I can't read Chinese.
Unfortunately it will likely be very difficult to find information on the advancement of glassblowing techniques in China.  What collectors know in North America comes from fifty years' worth of research, which included talking to the people who made the bottles back when they were still alive in the 60's and 70's.  It's not something that was very well recorded because a hundred years ago they couldn't have imagined that people in the future would be interested in how they were making bottles.  Another issue is that from the Chinese bottles I have in my collection, it seems that they were using very different techniques and levels of quality control at the same time in history.  Most Chinese bottles dug in Canada were brought here around 1890-1920, and some of them are extremely crudely made while others were made using the most modern techniques of the era.


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## sandchip

cannibalfromhannibal said:


> Well, I don't know about all that as I have had decanters with an apparently twisted pontil scar and refired on some and others not. I see no such evidence to the contrary and will leave it at that. I also realize we have come a long way from the earlier days of collecting on figuring out what went on in the early glassmaking, but to say with certainty that that is the case is a rather bold assumption considering the numerous variety of possibilities. That aside, I had no reason to figure this guy is from China which makes anything possible. Guess I'll go jump back into my hole and continue digging and just leave this page to you "experts."



Jack, I wasn't trying to rile you or anyone else with my comments but only trying to help.  No, I wasn't there but I believe by simple reasoning that not only is there no such thing as twisted off pontil scars, but refired pontils are yet another myth.  To twist off a pontil rod from a bottle, the glass would have to be of the consistency of caramel, and that hot bottle has to somehow be held while the rod is twisted off.  What was used to hold it that wouldn't deform or otherwise damage or deface the bottle?  What, a snap case, maybe?  That would be going around the world to visit our next door neighbor!  And keep in mind, these guys were production-minded to turn out as many bottles as possible.  Also, they didn't have torches to apply heat to an isolated area of a bottle so that they could twist off a pontil rod so that wishful future collectors could say that they found a pontilled bottle that in fact was only smooth-based.  (I've only found 7 pontils in my 42 years of looking, and nobody wishes more than I do!)  The same logic would apply to so-called refired pontils.  To apply enough heat to cause the pontil scar to melt back into the surface of the bottle base would destroy the entire bottle, but also taking time that these workers didn't have to waste.  Once again, how were these guys holding that bottle while they tried to stick the base into the furnace?  Snap case?  Blowpipe?  Bare hands?  Come on, y'all!  Grinding and polishing was the method used to eliminate unsightly scars from more expensive wares, done after the bottle or decanter had cooled and could be handled by hand.

I'm probably ticking off a lot of folks here, and that's my last wish, but it is what it is.  Just like the crescent-shaped "mold repairs" that caused such a hot debate a couple of years ago.  Mr. Red Matthews, who worked in the glass industry, argued a couple of years defending that theory before finally accepting that those marks were indeed only the case of the gather being pinched between the mold halves, which were reopened, the gather rotated a little, mold closed and bottle blown.  Remember once again, these workers were hauling butt, not only to knock out as many bottles as possible, but also because the hot glass has a very tight window of workability before stiffening up.  It's a wonder that there aren't more of those marks.  Those workers were amazing.  Hell, that brings up another thing, the crude "drippy" tops that we love so.  "...caused by the hot glass running down the neck..."  It's only where the string of hot glass was applied inaccurately (because they had to work so fast) to the whetted off (sheared) bottle neck, before using the lipping tool.  The bottle was being held horizontally during this process, so the glass couldn't be running down the neck.  The hot glass was pretty soft, enough so that they had to keep the bottle rotating to prevent slumping, but it wasn't runny like syrup.

I'm done now.  Y'all can unload on me all you want.

Love y'all.  Mean it.


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## haide

Oh，I confused two dollars as one...
I tried to find some informations of Chinese bottles，and some books came out，not of the later functional bottles，but all of those ancient colourful glasses(coloured glaze).As far as I can see,the manufacturing of glass bottles here in the past 200 years is quite underdeveloped，lacking of scale，could be an
 explanation of that，you can hardly find too many bottles in a very same style in the market. There're plenty of different styles of which each one just shows up on a very single bottle.
My pleasure to translate the characters on your Chinese bottles，but I'm not sure if I can do that well,since the antic Chinese is a bit hard to read even for Chinese，and  communicating with you fellows here is actually my first time using English after school，I'm typing while dictionarying all the time.


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## haide

This is a big meal for me to digest.
You are all so kind here，thank you.



sandchip said:


> Jack, I wasn't trying to rile you or anyone else with my comments but only trying to help.  No, I wasn't there but I believe by simple reasoning that not only is there no such thing as twisted off pontil scars, but refired pontils are yet another myth.  To twist off a pontil rod from a bottle, the glass would have to be of the consistency of caramel, and that hot bottle has to somehow be held while the rod is twisted off.  What was used to hold it that wouldn't deform or otherwise damage or deface the bottle?  What, a snap case, maybe?  That would be going around the world to visit our next door neighbor!  And keep in mind, these guys were production-minded to turn out as many bottles as possible.  Also, they didn't have torches to apply heat to an isolated area of a bottle so that they could twist off a pontil rod so that wishful future collectors could say that they found a pontilled bottle that in fact was only smooth-based.  (I've only found 7 pontils in my 42 years of looking, and nobody wishes more than I do!)  The same logic would apply to so-called refired pontils.  To apply enough heat to cause the pontil scar to melt back into the surface of the bottle base would destroy the entire bottle, but also taking time that these workers didn't have to waste.  Once again, how were these guys holding that bottle while they tried to stick the base into the furnace?  Snap case?  Blowpipe?  Bare hands?  Come on, y'all!  Grinding and polishing was the method used to eliminate unsightly scars from more expensive wares, done after the bottle or decanter had cooled and could be handled by hand.
> 
> I'm probably ticking off a lot of folks here, and that's my last wish, but it is what it is.  Just like the crescent-shaped "mold repairs" that caused such a hot debate a couple of years ago.  Mr. Red Matthews, who worked in the glass industry, argued a couple of years defending that theory before finally accepting that those marks were indeed only the case of the gather being pinched between the mold halves, which were reopened, the gather rotated a little, mold closed and bottle blown.  Remember once again, these workers were hauling butt, not only to knock out as many bottles as possible, but also because the hot glass has a very tight window of workability before stiffening up.  It's a wonder that there aren't more of those marks.  Those workers were amazing.  Hell, that brings up another thing, the crude "drippy" tops that we love so.  "...caused by the hot glass running down the neck..."  It's only where the string of hot glass was applied inaccurately (because they had to work so fast) to the whetted off (sheared) bottle neck, before using the lipping tool.  The bottle was being held horizontally during this process, so the glass couldn't be running down the neck.  The hot glass was pretty soft, enough so that they had to keep the bottle rotating to prevent slumping, but it wasn't runny like syrup.
> 
> I'm done now.  Y'all can unload on me all you want.
> 
> Love y'all.  Mean it.


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## sandchip

haide said:


> This is a big meal for me to digest.
> You are all so kind here，thank you.



Thanks, haide.  I hope that I've been of some help, because that's what it's all about.  I appreciate the reply because at times, I've thought about changing my name to "threadkiller"!


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## haide

sandchip said:


> Thanks, haide.  I hope that I've been of some help, because that's what it's all about.  I appreciate the reply because at times, I've thought about changing my name to "threadkiller"!



Sincerely,it's more than help. I believe different voices rub to the truth.So may I say:enjoy yourselfs “fighting” and “killing”.


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## CanadianBottles

haide said:


> Oh，I confused two dollars as one...
> I tried to find some informations of Chinese bottles，and some books came out，not of the later functional bottles，but all of those ancient colourful glasses(coloured glaze).As far as I can see,the manufacturing of glass bottles here in the past 200 years is quite underdeveloped，lacking of scale，could be an
> explanation of that，you can hardly find too many bottles in a very same style in the market. There're plenty of different styles of which each one just shows up on a very single bottle.
> My pleasure to translate the characters on your Chinese bottles，but I'm not sure if I can do that well,since the antic Chinese is a bit hard to read even for Chinese，and  communicating with you fellows here is actually my first time using English after school，I'm typing while dictionarying all the time.



Thanks Haide, I really appreciate that!  I tried taking pictures of them and it didn't work out too well (lousy phone camera) so instead I wrote out the characters to the best of my ability and will try to post them here.  Some of them had very small, difficult to read characters and since I didn't know what I was writing they may be completely indecipherable, but I think at least some of them should be legible.  I'll try to post them tomorrow, I'm having difficulties posting photos from my phone and it's too late tonight.

By the way, your English is quite good for someone who hasn't used it since school.  I can almost always understand exactly what you're saying and half of the time you get the grammar right, which is quite impressive since the grammar is completely different than Chinese grammar (at least I assume it is).  

I'm surprised to hear that you don't find many bottles of the same kind for sale, since in British Columbia there were several kinds of Chinese bottles that consistently showed up.  I guess it's because only certain products were shipped to Canada.  In Canada the most common designs were:
Small square medicine bottles, usually unembossed but occasionally would have one or two characters on the bottom


Ring-neck beer or other alcoholic beverage bottles, usually, if not always, from the Wing Lee Wai company

Tiger whiskeys, though always in stoneware and never glass (you know what those look like).
Stoneware bottles with spouts commonly called soy sauce bottles.  I don't know if this is what they actually contained:

None of those pictures are mine, but I have an example of all of them.  Do you ever see bottles like those in China?  They shipped thousands upon thousands of them to Canada and the Northwestern U.S.  There are other sorts of Chinese bottles in Canada, lots of regular beer bottles and various shapes of medicine bottles, but those four are the most commonly found.
There were also a couple types of bottles which I previously believed to be Chinese, but after seeing pictures of the same bottles found at WWII sites on Guam I'm quite sure that they're Japanese.  When I figure out how to post pictures of the writing on the bottles I have I bet that some of them will turn out to be Japanese rather than Chinese.


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## andy volkerts

And let us not forget that the San Francisco glassworks made several types of bottles with Japanese and Chinese writing on them for their customers of Asian descent over the years..........


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## haide

CanadianBottles said:


> Thanks Haide, I really appreciate that!  I tried taking pictures of them and it didn't work out too well (lousy phone camera) so instead I wrote out the characters to the best of my ability and will try to post them here.  Some of them had very small, difficult to read characters and since I didn't know what I was writing they may be completely indecipherable, but I think at least some of them should be legible.  I'll try to post them tomorrow, I'm having difficulties posting photos from my phone and it's too late tonight.
> 
> By the way, your English is quite good for someone who hasn't used it since school.  I can almost always understand exactly what you're saying and half of the time you get the grammar right, which is quite impressive since the grammar is completely different than Chinese grammar (at least I assume it is).
> 
> I'm surprised to hear that you don't find many bottles of the same kind for sale, since in British Columbia there were several kinds of Chinese bottles that consistently showed up.  I guess it's because only certain products were shipped to Canada.  In Canada the most common designs were:
> Small square medicine bottles, usually unembossed but occasionally would have one or two characters on the bottom
> View attachment 171025
> Ring-neck beer or other alcoholic beverage bottles, usually, if not always, from the Wing Lee Wai company
> View attachment 171026
> Tiger whiskeys, though always in stoneware and never glass (you know what those look like).
> Stoneware bottles with spouts commonly called soy sauce bottles.  I don't know if this is what they actually contained:
> View attachment 171027
> None of those pictures are mine, but I have an example of all of them.  Do you ever see bottles like those in China?  They shipped thousands upon thousands of them to Canada and the Northwestern U.S.  There are other sorts of Chinese bottles in Canada, lots of regular beer bottles and various shapes of medicine bottles, but those four are the most commonly found.
> There were also a couple types of bottles which I previously believed to be Chinese, but after seeing pictures of the same bottles found at WWII sites on Guam I'm quite sure that they're Japanese.  When I figure out how to post pictures of the writing on the bottles I have I bet that some of them will turn out to be Japanese rather than Chinese.



I don't have a phone problem because I only use PC browsing web,however,you may not believe that，Chinese government blocked so many foreign websites，and I can’t find a reason to explain that this site is included.So my problem is I can only be here by using VPN，and sometimes it doesn't work well.

Thank you for the encouraging of my English,I think I should use it more frequently，and do not be shy of the mistakes.What surprised me is you can read  some characters，as far as I know，Chinese is not clearer than Martain language for you Indo European，and if you knew nothing about Chinese，I don't think a dictionary would help，because you can't even get the location of the character you want to find. 

When I said it's easy to find unique bottles here，I included the embossing.Compared with your rich and colourful bottles，as you know，Chinese bottles are more monotonous in colour and shape.The embossed medicine bottles are welcome here,any piece could be asked for more than 100 yuan.I belive ring-neck beer you posted is for export when I googled "Wing Lee Wai",which is a Hong Kong wine company founded in 1905.Almost all I found are stoneware,asked for 100-300 yuan,I’ll post some pictures.


What's the size of the soy sauce bottle?I'm not very familiar with these，but I know there is a similar type called “shui-zhu”（water filler），which is used for adding water while writing calligraphy,though,I prefer the kitchen things, according to the bodily proportion and the rough quality.

Very happy to introduce the Chinese bottles ，expect your photos.


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## haide

andy volkerts said:


> And let us not forget that the San Francisco glassworks made several types of bottles with Japanese and Chinese writing on them for their customers of Asian descent over the years..........



Thanks for the information,I did not know that.I did found some bottles embossed both in Chinese and English,seems like imports,but I don't know whether the bottles were made in China.


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## CanadianBottles

I was wondering whether or not this site would be blocked in China.  Does the government block all discussion-based sites from the rest of the world?  Or all vBulletin forums?  I'm not sure why else this specific site would be targeted, unless they found enough of some certain keywords in the post history.  

Ha ha no I couldn't read the writing, I just copied it like I would anything else.  I still don't even quite understand how written Chinese works.  So my attempts at writing out what was written on the bottles may be comically bad, I can't tell.  

I'm surprised that you say Chinese bottles are more monotonous than Western bottles, since I remember seeing Chinese bottles in all sorts of fantastic colours that you rarely see in Western bottles when I lived on the West Coast.  It's strange to see how expensive and hard it is to find bottles in China compared with how easy it is to find Chinese bottles in Canada.  Canada didn't even have that many Chinese people at the time these bottles were used, I think there were around 10,000 Chinese people in the whole province at the turn of the century.  I guess the problem is that no one is digging for bottles in China, whereas in Canada people have been digging up bottles for years, especially in the 1970's when the hobby was really popular.  It's a shame you don't have access to anywhere to go digging, because I'm sure there are millions upon millions of fantastic bottles buried all over the place in China.  

I've heard of those stoneware Wing Lee Wai bottles, though I don't remember ever seeing one.  A few turn up here and there but very rarely.  I'm guessing the glass bottles were intended for export while the stoneware ones were for use in China.  

The soy sauce bottles are about the size of a tiger whiskey.  I doubt they have anything to do with calligraphy, they're way too large and unweildy for any use that I can imagine.

Okay I'll try to post the pictures in a sec.  These are just pictures of post-it notes with the characters written on them, since the bottles were too difficult to photograph.


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## CanadianBottles

Okay I hope this works.


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## CanadianBottles

Well that didn't work.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to post the pictures or not.  I might need to buy a new camera first, or get my phone fixed.


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## haide

CanadianBottles said:


> I was wondering whether or not this site would be blocked in China.  Does the government block all discussion-based sites from the rest of the world?  Or all vBulletin forums?  I'm not sure why else this specific site would be targeted, unless they found enough of some certain keywords in the post history.
> 
> Ha ha no I couldn't read the writing, I just copied it like I would anything else.  I still don't even quite understand how written Chinese works.  So my attempts at writing out what was written on the bottles may be comically bad, I can't tell.
> 
> I'm surprised that you say Chinese bottles are more monotonous than Western bottles, since I remember seeing Chinese bottles in all sorts of fantastic colours that you rarely see in Western bottles when I lived on the West Coast.  It's strange to see how expensive and hard it is to find bottles in China compared with how easy it is to find Chinese bottles in Canada.  Canada didn't even have that many Chinese people at the time these bottles were used, I think there were around 10,000 Chinese people in the whole province at the turn of the century.  I guess the problem is that no one is digging for bottles in China, whereas in Canada people have been digging up bottles for years, especially in the 1970's when the hobby was really popular.  It's a shame you don't have access to anywhere to go digging, because I'm sure there are millions upon millions of fantastic bottles buried all over the place in China.
> 
> I've heard of those stoneware Wing Lee Wai bottles, though I don't remember ever seeing one.  A few turn up here and there but very rarely.  I'm guessing the glass bottles were intended for export while the stoneware ones were for use in China.
> 
> The soy sauce bottles are about the size of a tiger whiskey.  I doubt they have anything to do with calligraphy, they're way too large and unweildy for any use that I can imagine.
> 
> Okay I'll try to post the pictures in a sec.  These are just pictures of post-it notes with the characters written on them, since the bottles were too difficult to photograph.



Rumor has it that,the blocking policy may change from black list system to white list system,only the sites listed could be opened by then,and the death of VPN,that's horrible,hope it's just rumor,how can we go back to Qing Dynasty.

Ha,I bet chinese character is more like drawing than writing for you.You have a photo problem or post problem？I think you could try some drawing software for the former.

All sorts of fantastic colours like what?some kind of solid colors?You mean the antique bottles or the later art bottles？transparent or not?

You have so many bottles outta there to dig,were they just buried as garbage in the old days？You didn't recycle them？Here in China in the old days，I think there ‘re some differences,wars and lack of materials.What ever,I really wish I would find a bottles cemetery one day,that's a dream for me now!


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## CanadianBottles

Oh boy, is there talk of the government figuring out how to block off the VPN's?  That would be terrible if they did.  I don't think they can do that though, can they?  I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that.  The only way I could think of them doing that would be by replacing the internet infrastructure with a North Korea-style China-only intranet.  And I don't think they really care enough about people accessing the banned websites to do that.  Chinese people are able to visit other countries, after all, so it's not like eliminating the use of VPN's would keep people who wanted to from finding out about things that the government wants to keep hidden.

I used to see lots of Chinese bottles that were cobalt blue or teal, those were the main interesting colours that I saw.  We don't get teal bottles very much in North America, at least not the bright teal that I see Chinese and Japanese bottles in.  Every other colour that Canadian or American bottles come in I saw Chinese bottles in as well, except for purple.  I don't know if Chinese bottles don't turn purple in the sun or if I just never happened to see one.  

Yeah here most bottles were just buried as garbage.  There wasn't much recycling going on in the sense of melting down bottles and making them into something else.  Bottles were reused, and bottles containing things like soda and milk would often have a deposit on them when you returned them, but they still managed to end up in garbage dumps quite frequently.  Medicine bottles would be reused as well by local pharmacists, but the vast majority of them were thrown out after use.

Was there a lot of glass recycling going on in China before the mid-20th century?  I remember hearing that Japanese glass fishing floats (which used to wash up on the West Coast quite a lot but are now very difficult to find) were made out of recycled glass.  If the bottles were all being melted down then it would definitely make it harder to dig them up.  It seems like at least some of them must have been thrown out though.  It would be strange to think that North America would be the best place to dig Chinese bottles.  I was trying to see if I could find any mention of bottle digging in Asia online but the only thing I could find was someone on here a while ago who was collecting bottles and other things left over from the war in Guam.

I finally figured out how to get the pictures on here!  I rarely use my phone for the internet so I don't really know what I'm doing on there but I figured out how to send the pictures to myself in an email.  Unfortunately they're sideways.  I haven't figured out how to deal with that.
This first one is a small medicine bottle with a picture of a deer on it.


This one's a regular beer bottle with embossing on the bottom.  It may be upside down.  I can't tell.

This one has these two characters repeated around the shoulder.  It's probably a beverage bottle of some sort.  I don't think it's particularly old.  

I may have a couple more, I'll have to see.  Most of the bottles that I thought had Chinese writing on them turned out to be variations of the same brand of Japanese beer.


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## haide

It was just hearsay，honestly I barely know nothing about network technique.It seems that you are an expert in this area,and your analysis has set my mind at ease.

Soda and milk bottles are reused here,and maybe some kind of decanters too,I think（I would have gotten a precise conclusion if I drink）Here in China，when a glass bottle is considered to be thrown out，mostly it will be taken away by a garbage man at your door，for cents，this was probably the only way of the leaving of a family-use glass bottle before 2000，and is still popular nowadays.Then,the garbage man sell the bottle to a garbage station.I did visit a garbage station few days ago，mountains of bottles，almost decanters，perfect or smashed,came from hotels in my opinion.What happened to bottles before the mid-20th century?I can't be sure，but what I know is that,during the war,there were so many household metalware,such as pots,pans,basins and shovels were confiscated to be melted down to manufacture arms. 

So,it may be the first time you write Chinese characters？really not bad.Seems that the embossing is not strong enough to distinguish every stroke，but fortunately most of them you wrote out are definitely recognized.

On the first one are traditional Chinese characters，which are still used in HONG KONG and TAI WAN,but have been disappeared for decades in the mainland.I have never learned this since my first class.The one on the upper right corner was much simplified by you I think,then it will be "yue",an abbreviation of "Guangdon Province" .I considered trying to translate them in their positions but not sure it works after post，so：

On the left：
registered trademark
beware of fake           

On the right：
the eastern part of Guangdong province
？lan tang（shop name）  
zi bian chuan（trademark） 
musk

I happened find two “yue don”，is yours the same？one is asked for 300 yuan，the other one is 350 yuan，but I think 100 yuan would be a sold price.


You got the right direction of the second one,the up and down are traditional Chinese characters,means "plus sign"or "the right shop"in free translation when put together，I'm not sure the left and right,I guess the right one is“select”，but have no idea of the left one.



The last one is seal character,ancient to 2000 years.

I'm not sure of the upper one,but I guess it's"golden"，and “golden line”for two.I got a picture of seal characters“golden”：

the upper left in black is the modern one，others in black are all seal characters of“golden”，the upper right is similar to yours.

Maybe I have one Chinses bottle in teal，if teal is between blue and green，it's too late to photo now，next time I’ll post some.I bid several bottles and cups：

all of them，just 150 yuan，shipping free...I searched the embossing and was surprised to find that one of them was estimated to be$200-300(No.144)：

 Is that ture?I will post some clear pictures when I receive them，I think it's a pattern of digging in China.


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## haide

Sorry，I made a mistake:the confiscation was not during the war time，but between 1958 and 1960，to develop steel industry，it was named the Great Leap Forward.

Is the middle one in teal？This one is a unique one as I said，I have never found another one like this.It is embossed “made by mountain village sincerely”


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## CanadianBottles

Ha ha no I'm definitely not an expert in that area, I'm not even really sure how the internet works exactly.  But I can safely say that if it was easy to make the VPN's not work, the Chinese government would already have done it.  My understanding of the government's reason for blocking a lot of the internet isn't so much to keep individuals from accessing things that the government doesn't want them seeing, but to make it difficult to easily spread ideas that the government doesn't want being spread among massive amounts of people.  I don't think they're particularly worried about the VPN's because China's population is so large that individuals accessing banned information just can't cause that much of an effect by themselves.  So although I don't know for sure, I would be extremely surprised if the government is actually planning on cutting off the use of VPN's.

In the West we had a similar thing happen here up until the mid-20th century, where what we called rag-and-bone men would go door to door and collect trash to resell.  And they did collect bottles, I believe to sell them to companies which would reuse them.  I don't think glass recycling was advanced enough back then to melt them down and remake them into new bottles.  A huge number of bottles still ended up in dumps though.  Some people, especially the rich I suspect, since five cents was a fair amount of money back then, didn't bother to get the money from the bottles, even the ones with deposits on them.  Milk and soda bottles weren't supposed to be thrown out, and some bottles even had writing on them saying it was illegal to dispose of them, but people still did.  
I've read about the Great Leap Forward and the confiscation of steel, that was a really tragic time.  I don't expect that they would have confiscated or even bothered collecting bottles though, they just weren't useful enough to anyone other than the companies using them.  In rural areas people may have been more likely to reuse bottles until they broke, but I still feel like there would have been bottles buried in cities at least.  Hong Kong especially, since it was a British Colony, I would expect to act like the other British colonies and have large garbage dumps full of bottles.  

Thanks for the translation, I really appreciate it!  Yeah it's my first time writing Chinese characters, and since the embossing on that little bottle was not very clear it was quite difficult.  I had to guess at what they were trying to write a lot of the time.  I wouldn't have expected that first one to contain musk.  My bottle is a similar size to the ones pictured but it's round and has a picture of a deer embossed on it.

That was a good find for 150 yuan, and I have no idea if that wide-mouth jar is worth that much but hopefully it is!  I'm also curious about what colour that pickle jar to the left of the table salt jars is.  Those bottles all look like they came out of a river or a mud flat, since there are so many glasses I'm wondering if it might have been a shipwreck.  That's not normal to find in a bottle dump, since people back then had no reason to throw drinking glasses away.

Yes that little bottle is teal.  I'm not sure how often the colour was used in China but it was used extensively in Japan, where they used it for sake bottles.  I can't think of a single incidence of it being used in Canada.


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## haide

I've heard the fire，that's really a tragedy,hope everything is gonna be alright.

I think the VPN's is sort of business relating to the government，whatever，it’s the money which would be the only solution and the only thing you have to pay to solve.So,let's just not worry about it for the government.

Back to the 1950s,or even the 1970s in China,it's not only the steel industry but also every single resource in every aspect of daily life is in short. As a slogan,"To save a glorious,waste of shame"could be seen everywhere,even on bottles were embossed.So,if there was one reason not to recycle the broken glasses(the good ones were hardly discarded until there came out a crash,actully,I have seen several oil lamps which were converted by bottles) ，it would be—as you assumed—the recycling cost was more than the original cost.

There was no musk bottle like yours seen here in my impression，as I said，not hard to find unique bottles here—single-digit ones at least .Is that bottle common up there？I found a stoneware like yours more or less，the embossed characters identify it as a container of medicinal wine.


Unfortunately the target jar was broken in transit，making the deal a fairer one.The pickle jar is kind of very light purple or smoky gray?I have consulted the seller for the source,they did not come out of water,but came from a country family.


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## CanadianBottles

I didn't know the For McMurray fire was getting coverage as far away as China!  Fortunately everything turned out more or less okay, considering what could have happened.  Everyone managed to evacuate and I think 85% of the city was saved, including all the important infrastructure.  I was watching the dash cam videos of people fleeing the fire and that must have been a terrifying drive out of the city with flames right up against the road.  The firefighters did a great job and prevented what might have been a tragedy comparable to the Lac-Megantic disaster a few years ago.

I would be curious to go digging in a Chinese garbage dump from that era, to see what sort of things actually did get thrown out.  I'd guess that at least broken glass was thrown out because I don't think there was much use for it back then, and probably broken pottery too.  I'm not sure what else back then wouldn't be able to be reused for something.

No the musk bottle isn't common here, at least not as far as I know.  I don't remember ever seeing another Chinese bottle with a picture of an animal embossed in it.  I've managed to get a decent picture of that bottle and I'll post it when I get a chance.  I've also got a couple more pictures of bottles that I forgot I had, which are common medicine bottles in B.C.  At least I assume they're medicine bottles, they might not be.

That stoneware bottle does look a lot like the soy sauce bottles we find in Canada, but I've never seen one with a wide mouth like that.  I've also never seen Chinese stoneware with that kind of debossing on it.  At least I think that's what it is, I'm not completely sure.

That's a shame about the jar.  I wonder what made the bottles so dirty.  I've only ever seen that kind of coating on bottles from a marsh or insulators on telegraph poles where steam locomotives frequently traveled, causing the smoke would coat the insulators.  Most bottles that come out of the ground are somewhat cleaner, or are stained with minerals, which those clearly aren't because the stains don't wash off.


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