is this a pontil scar？

Okay I hope this works.

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.

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.

Click to expand...

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!

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.

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.

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”

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.

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.

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.